Photography
Des canyons aux étoiles, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Dudamel, BarbicanThursday, 24 March 2016
Art can inspire music, and vice versa. When concert (as opposed to theatre or film) scores are accompanied by images, however, the effect dilutes the impact of both; above all, the imagination stops working on the visual dimension created in the... Read more... |
Paul Strand, Victoria & Albert MuseumSaturday, 19 March 2016
Once you’ve seen him, you can’t forget him. Taken in 1951, Paul Strand’s black and white portrait of a French teenager sears itself onto your retina. He stares unflinchingly back, and looking into his eyes, you feel almost scalded by his exceptional... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Pianist Boris GiltburgSunday, 28 February 2016
London has been missing out on Boris Giltburg for too long. He's been playing Shostakovich concertos back to back with Petrenko in Liverpool, and the big Rachmaninov works up in Scotland (see theartsdesk's review today of the latest Royal Scottish... Read more... |
Avedon Warhol, Gagosian GalleryThursday, 25 February 2016
It is an inspired pairing: iconic images by the American photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and the painter, printmaker and filmmaker Andy Warhol (1928-1987), almost all of whose mature work was based on the photographic image. They are... Read more... |
Performing for the Camera, Tate ModernSaturday, 20 February 2016
The earliest known selfie is as old as the medium itself – literally. Hippolyte Bayard, one of the inventors of photography, pictured himself as a drowned man. His technique of photographic printing on paper had been upstaged by the daguerrotype, a... Read more... |
Vogue 100, National Portrait GalleryMonday, 15 February 2016
When it got too hard to ship the original American edition across the Atlantic during the Great War, British Vogue appeared as a sister publication in the Condé Nast empire. The first issue in September 1916 announced in its editorial: “The time has... Read more... |
Saul Leiter, Photographers' GalleryMonday, 25 January 2016
One of the great joys of being a critic is discovering someone remarkable you’ve never heard of before. By the time he died in 2013 aged 90, the American photographer Saul Leiter had gained a degree of recognition, but it had been slow in coming and... Read more... |
Søren Dahlgaard’s Dough PortraitsSunday, 03 January 2016
Can a portrait really be a portrait if we can’t see a person’s face? And what if the reason we can’t see their face is that it is covered with a lump of dough? Is it a joke? And if it is a joke, is it on us or them? Or perhaps it is a joke about art... Read more... |
Best of 2015: ArtMonday, 28 December 2015
From weaselly shyster to spineless drip, the biographies of Goya’s subjects are often superfluous: exactly what he thought of each of his subjects is jaw-droppingly evident in each and every portrait he painted. Quite how Goya got away with it is a... Read more... |
Julia Margaret Cameron, Victoria & Albert Museum / Science MuseumMonday, 30 November 2015
Reputations and popularity rise and fall and rise again in cycles, and so with the redoubtable Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879). Now considered one of the finest photographers ever, she was an amateur gifted with incredible tenacity, intellectual... Read more... |
We Made It: Wildlife photographer Roger HooperSunday, 15 November 2015
Aged 64, Roger Hooper is still braving the Antarctic and plunging into the Amazon rainforests in search of that perfect photograph. Based in London when he’s not traversing the globe, he regularly exhibits work, has produced three books, and... Read more... |
Portraits from the 2015 Taylor Wessing PrizeSaturday, 14 November 2015
At first glance David Stewart’s Five Girls 2014, the winning entry in this year’s Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize, is a very ordinary scene. Five young women sit behind a table, obligatory mobile phones within reach and lying amongst the... Read more... |
