The Brooklyn Rail

In Conversation

AN-MY LÊ with Sara Christoph

Living through the Vietnam War as a child and immigrating to the United States as a teenager, An-My Lê’s life has been indelibly marked by international conflict. For over two decades, her work as a photographer has engaged the unseen facets within the theater of war.

In Conversation

SHAHZIA SIKANDER with Sara Christoph

Since moving to the U.S. from Pakistan in the mid-’90s, Shahzia Sikander has pushed through boundaries corroded by decades of multiculturalist rhetoric with an artistic practice that reimagines the connections between Eastern experiences and Western perspectives.

In Conversation

THOMAS ROMA and LEO RUBINFIEN with Sara Christoph

For Thomas Roma and Leo Rubinfien, two photographers who came of age when American giants like Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, and Garry Winogrand were redefining the black-and-white medium, conversations around the practice of photography are fist-shaking discussions of life, tears, vulnerability, and ethics.

GERMAINE RICHIER

Though housed in the impeccable walls of Dominique Lévy uptown, the sculptures of Germaine Richier look to have been unearthed just moments ago, as if pulled from the ground like the cast bodies of Pompeii.

FORREST BESS Seeing Things Invisible

“I feel like a pelican in a church,” Forrest Bess wrote to his dealer, Betty Parsons, in 1949. He was staying at a friend’s house in Woodstock, New York, painting and passing time until the opening of his first show in December of that same year.

CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS The Production Line of Happiness

Stepping through the grand red doorway of The Production Line of Happiness, a single photograph of a finger touching a glowing green button hangs on the wall.

MUNRO GALLOWAY Belief System

Munro Galloway’s recent exhibition at Soloway, entitled Belief System, begins with a Surrealist prompt and ends with pure pigment, rich and untethered.

Personal Correspondents: Photography and Letter Writing in Civil War Brooklyn

A boy with a youthful round face, maybe eight or ten years old, stands tall with his arms relaxed at his sides. He wears a dark suit, well-worn boots, and a wrinkled white apron. His clothes swallow his body as if designed for someone taller.

CLEMENT SIATOUS Sagren

In 1968, in coordination with the United States, the British government began to forcibly expel nearly 2,000 inhabitants of Diego Garcia, the largest of the Chagos Islands chain in the Indian Ocean.

Johan Grimonprez  | blue orchids |

In describing the indomitable corporations that shape the global arms trade, Riccardo Privitera, star of Johan Grimonprez’s film blue orchids (2017), takes a long draw from his Merit cigarette, and shapes his stout fingers into a claw.

Beatriz Santiago MUÑOZ A Universe of Fragile Mirrors

The films of San Juan-based artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz are startlingly enchanting. Steeped in the visual traditions of cinéma vérité and postcolonial theory, the filmmaker’s long, intimate shots belie rigorous tactics of destabilization.

William Eggleston The Democratic Forest

Through the lens of Eggleston’s sensuous, radical color, the things that seemed so distant at the time—most poignantly, the fragility of the American Dream—were very close indeed.

GARRY WINOGRAND

“I think there isn’t a photograph in the world that has any narrative ability,” Garry Winogrand told Bill Moyers in 1982. “They do not tell stories—they show you what something looks like. To a camera.”

A World of Emotions: Ancient Greece, 700 BC - 200 AD

The tragedy of Ajax, a fierce, respected warrior who loses himself within frenzied slaughter, still resounds two thousand years later. “Yet I feel his wretchedness,” Odysseus, his rival, laments. “My enemy, yes, but caught up in a terrible doom.

CLARE GRILL Comb

What does it mean, now, in an age of public spectacle and private surveillance, to paint pictures of domestic life? Has that word—domestic—already prodded you to the next review? It is a term so loaded, so heavy with the dueling stones of feminist theory and conservative conformity.

ADRIANA VAREJÃO Kindred Spirits

In the spring of 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law, erecting a boundary—the Mississippi River—between Americans in the East, and those unwelcome inhabitants, Native Americans, forced to the West.

SARAH PETERS

In the mythological tales of ancient Greece, the power of a “seer” was her ability to see through time—both a blessing and a curse.

ARNE SVENSON: The Workers

Photographer Arne Svenson has garnered much notoriety as of late. The infamy began in 2013, when Svenson was lampooned in the Tribeca Citizen by his neighbors, appalled that he would secretly photograph them within their glass houses (The Neighbors, 2012). He went to court twice to protect his actions as fine art; twice the court ruled in his favor.

FRANCESCA WOODMAN

In 1978, when Francesca Woodman was 20 years old and beginning a life as an artist, John Berger wrote “Uses of Photography.” In the essay, Berger distinguishes between two functions of the medium: private and public.

A Sequence of Coherent Words

In these dark, unshakable, post-election days—when terrible contingencies claw at one’s balance—what is an art writer to do? Language feels imperiled, rhetoric thrown about like confetti and calcifying into a divisive wall of apathy.

The Ten Best Art Books of 2014

The Rail’s selection of the best art books of 2014.

Portraits: John Berger on Artists

For many of us, John Berger is a marker in time. There is the period before our first exposure to his profound and radical insights, and the period after, when the controlling circuitries of power and class are revealed.

How To See the World: An Introduction to Images, from Self-Portraits to Selfies, Maps to Movies, and More

How To See the World is like a set of jumper cables for the eyes, jolting us out of our image glut. Nicholas Mirzoeff, a visual culture theorist and professor of media at NYU, continues the democratizing work of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) by expanding the scope of image studies to phenomena as diverse as 19th-century battlefield maps and astronaut selfies in space.

Rosemary’s Greenpoint Tavern

Only four swift, tourist-cluttered blocks from the newly minted Apple store, a veritable oasis lies in wait. Push through Rosemary’s swinging wooden doors and bathe in a ruby-red glow of year-round Christmas lights, throw back a $3 Budweiser, and attempt to slowly out-woo a warm, dreadlocked bartender who calls everyone “honey.”

Marie’s Crisis

To the last evening of freedom—the toast heard with every clinking glass. On the night of Thursday, January 19, Marie’s Crisis, a stronghold of New York life for more than a century, bubbled over with Weimarian revelry.

The Fat Black Pussycat

On a recent, unseasonably frigid Saturday night, four friends turned to comedy for an escape from the times. (“If presidents can’t do it to their wives, they do it to their country,” Mel Brooks once said.)