Hilton Als

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Vince Aletti |Brian Seibert |Jane Bua |Hilton Als

“Constellation,” a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory (through Aug. 17), includes more than four hundred and fifty famous, little-known, and unknown photographs from her brief career, cut short by suicide in 1971, at the age of forty-eight. Controversy dogged her posthumous shows and publications, and though it has mostly been replaced by a profound appreciation, Arbus isn’t easy to love. The work remains tough, provocative, and brilliantly dark.

3 weeks ago | link.newyorker.com | Rachel Syme |Hilton Als |Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Plus: the heartrending movies of John Cazale; Sister Nancy’s eternal party; Richard Brody’s films for summer feels; and more. View in browser | What we’re watching, listening to, and doing this week. In today’s newsletter, John Cazale’s string of stone-cold classics.

3 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Hilton Als

Writing in this magazine in 1973, Kennedy Fraser referred to style as “individualistic, aristocratic, and reckless,” and one or all of those qualities can be seen in the various personalities whose sartorial choices are featured here, including the fantastic, in all senses of the word, Julius Soubise, an eighteenth-century dandy who was born into slavery in the Caribbean and more or less adopted into the aristocracy in England; the stately young W. E. B.

4 weeks ago | newyorker.com | Rachel Syme |Hilton Als |Helen Shaw |Sheldon Pearce |Taran Dugal |Jia Tolentino

Summer is a season ripe for scandal; people tend to be overheated and understimulated, looking to mist their crisping minds with idle gossip. Minor controversies can boil over, given the right temperature, into full-on imbroglios; such was the case in Paris in 1884, when the twenty-eight-year-old painter John Singer Sargent débuted a new large-scale portrait at the Salon, then the world’s most influential summer art show.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Hilton Als |Dan Stahl |Jane Bua |Vince Aletti

I met Alva Rogers years ago, through a mutual friend, and her various incarnations—actress, singer, artistic director, writer, puppeteer—have always been remarkable to me. As a young woman, Rogers posed for the artist Lorna Simpson, and is the subject of Simpson’s photograph-based piece “Waterbearer” (1986), along with other early works, and, of course, she was the nominal star of Julie Dash’s film “Daughters of the Dust” (1991), a fascinating evocation of Gullah culture in South Carolina.