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If It Bleeds
Weegee captured gruesome scenes of murder and mayhem, but the crimes are often incidental.
By James Polchin
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| In the fall of 1978, the International Center of Photography mounted the first retrospective of Weegee photographs. Reviews of the show were positive, though the reviews often centered on debates about the artfulness of Weegee’s tabloid images. The New York Times critic began with the very conundrum of this tension between art and news photography: “It is always faintly alarming to see the photographs of Weegee on exhibition at a museum or gallery. They were not made for exhibition but to be reproduced in tabloid newspapers.” Despite this beginning, the review affirms Weegee’s importance in American photography, and argues that his work influenced later artists such as Diane Arbus and Garry Winograd.
Just a few months before this retrospective opened, John Berger published his essay “The Uses of Photography.” In the essay, he makes a crucial distinction between private and public photography:
In the private use of photography, the context of the instant recorded is preserved so that the photograph lives in an ongoing continuity. (If you have a photograph of Peter on your wall, you are not likely to forget what Peter means to you.) The public photograph, by contrast, is torn from its context, and becomes a dead object which, exactly because it is dead, lends itself to any arbitrary use.
For Berger, public photographs — these dead objects — float in a stream of images such that the subject of any particular photographed moment or event turns into a generalized reality absent of context.
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BOOKSLUT
The Baby Market
International adoptions can be ugly or even illegal. But when it comes to babies, some families don't care.
By Jessa Crispin
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PERTINENT & IMPERTINENT
Greetings from Here
Joseph Roth's books and letters both pine for the past. But while the books balance sadness with joy, the letters are all melancholy.
By Stefany Anne Golberg
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CONSUMER CONFIDENCE
We Need to Talk About Ronald
While McDonald's remakes its menus, messages, and stores, the chain's iconic mascot is caught in limbo.
By Greg Beato
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IDEAS
The Eco Chamber
Umberto Eco's new book is either tasteless, perverse, or flat-out pointless. Such is his power to do whatever he wants.
By Paula Marantz Cohen
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FIRST PERSON
A Different Drummer
To be happy in marching band, you must maintain certain illusions. I lasted one year.
By Kati Nolfi
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FIRST PERSON
A Reckless Autonomy
My friends and I would do anything to see the bands we loved. They moved on to babies, mortgages, and jobs, but I can't give up the music.
By Aaron Gilbreath
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IDLE CHATTER
A Question of Timing
On the appeal of Detroit ''ruin porn,'' Anselm Kiefer's concrete cities, and the Rapture.
By Morgan Meis
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IDEAS
Paperback Politics
If you want to understand libertarian politics today, forget Ayn Rand. Read Robert Heinlein instead.
By Nick Mamatas
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