Author Archives: Deanna Silberman

Once every year, no matter what it usual line of business, every publicly owned company becomes a publisher. Men in red suspenders sit down with men in ponytails to cook up ideas. Design boards are trotted in and out of conference rooms, executives dicker over copy, the chairman sits for a flatter-or-fail portrait. Type is […]

It’s the delicate veil of hair on her leg that draws comments now, but when Edward Weston took the pristine nude of his lover, Charis Wilson, in 1936, it was the pubic hair that was troublesome. Wilson, now 75, has written that she remembers Weston poring over the print with a magnifying glass, trying to […]

Back in the American dream days of 1955, a young Swiss immigrant named Robert Frank took a used Ford and a Leica and the proceeds of a Guggenheim fellowship and set off on a two-year trip down the wild highways of this country. He took a lot of photographs and made a book out of […]

When photographer Garry Winogrand died, he left some unfinished business. Winogrand had always had a backlog. From the beginning, he insisted on snatching images from the flow of life rather than setting them up, an approach that made it certain he would shoot in quantity. And he was always more interested in hunting the pictures […]

So what are we to make of Niki Berg’s nude Self-Portrait With Mother–the mother’s ample pink body exposed, belly, scars, and all; the grown-up daughter hiding behind her? Should we be flinching like this? Wishing someone had called out a warning? “Mrs. Berg, Mrs. Berg, you’ve indulged this daughter once too often . . .” […]