Photography
In Hale County, Alabama, Two Visions of Place
Hale County, Ala., holds a special position in American visual culture. This is where Walker Evans made his photographs of white sharecropper families for “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” with James Agee’s text, a core document of Depression-era poverty. It is where William Christenberry, who grew up in nearby Tuscaloosa with roots in the […]
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AI’s Best Trick Yet Is Showering Us With Attention
One thing about inhabiting a face is that we can never quite see it the way others do. Mirrors give us a reversed image. Photographs freeze us in time at odd angles and, sometimes, in pitiless detail. Staring into a phone camera, preening to check our makeup or undereye circles, gives us a hyperreal mirror, […]
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How to Make Your Smartphone Photos So Much Better
Smartphone cameras and the software that automatically processes the images have become so good at creating fantastic photos on the fly that most people don’t even carry a separate camera anymore (well, except for some Gen Z-ers going retro). There are plenty of apps that can slap a filter on a picture to make it […]
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The Hottest Gen Z Gadget Is a 20-Year-Old Digital Camera
Last spring, Anthony Tabarez celebrated prom like many of today’s high schoolers: dancing the night away and capturing it through photos and videos. The snapshots show Mr. Tabarez, 18, and his friends grinning, jumping around and waving their arms from a crowded dance floor. But instead of using his smartphone, Mr. Tabarez documented prom night […]
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Jordan Peele’s New Film ‘Nope’ Explores ‘The Horse in Motion’
Near the beginning of “Nope,” Emerald (Keke Palmer), who with her brother, Otis Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya), runs an animal-wrangling service for Hollywood shoots, delivers a pitch on a set. (If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve heard the abridged version.) She cites a milestone in the development of cinema: a famous series of sequential photographs from […]
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Sharing Stories, and a View, Aboard the California Zephyr
I woke up around 5 a.m. to a low but incessant rumbling. Faint hints of daylight had appeared over my fellow passengers’ heads, most of which were still bent in rest. Some people yawned; others stared intently out the window at the valley. I had been aboard the train for about 40 hours, and there […]
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Documenting India’s Distinctive Birdhouses
Some years ago, while exploring Bhuj, a small city in Gujarat, India’s westernmost state, I stumbled upon a beautiful and initially enigmatic structure: a column that supported an enclosure adorned with hundreds of holes. It seemed to me to be a geometric abstraction of a giant tree — until a pigeon peeped out from one […]
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The Rise of the 0.5 Selfie
Julia Herzig, a 22-year-old from Larchmont, N.Y., has “an obsession.” It’s with taking a new kind of selfie — one that doesn’t exactly conform. In some of these selfies, Ms. Herzig’s forehead bulges across half of the frame. Her eyes are half disks, peering up at something beyond the camera. Her nose juts out. Her […]
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A Herd in Exile: Riding Horses on Mozambique’s Bazaruto Archipelago
With a map in one hand and a cold beer in the other, I sat alone at the bar of the Baobab Beach Backpackers Lodge in the coastal town of Vilankulo, gazing out at the sweeping sandbars and vivid turquoise waters that surround Mozambique’s Bazaruto Archipelago. I’d planned to leave the following morning for Zimbabwe, […]
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