Vince Aletti

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 Controversy dogged her posthumous shows and publications, and though it has mostly been replaced by a profound appreciation, Arbus isn’t easy to love.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.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Vince Aletti

“The New Art: American Photography, 1839–1910,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through July 20th, is a big, sprawling show of work from the medium’s era of busy development, as one format improved on and eclipsed another, and photography became a popular art. The show’s charting of the technical and scientific refinements that led from unique daguerreotypes to reproducible cartes de visite and stereographs help ground what could have been a dry and academic exhibition in a sense of discovery.

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.

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Vince Aletti

I remember the first time I saw a physique photograph, and I remember being both excited and upset at the sight of it. I was probably eight or nine, a child of the postwar boom, and on vacation with my family at the Jersey shore. We had stopped at a convenience store on the way home from a day at the beach, and I was pawing through the store’s magazine rack while my mother shopped. I don’t remember picking up the magazine, but it opened to a page which stopped and startled me.

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Sheldon Pearce |Jane Bua |Vince Aletti |Helen Shaw

From the start, Dance Theatre of Harlem’s history has been a cycle of struggle and triumph. The dancer Arthur Mitchell founded it in 1969, in response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The company thrived, until it didn’t, and was forced to shut down, in 2004, for almost a decade.