Visual Art

Browse our essays and reviews on visual art, photography, and architecture.

Trapped

Nine Lives directed by Rodrigo García.

  • Alan A. Stone

A Witness to Murder

Heinrich Jöst’s photographs of the Holocaust dwell in what Jean Améry called “the waiting room of death.”

  • Susie Linfield

Robert Capa’s Hope

The photographer wanted to show what freedom, and the people who made it, looked like.

  • Susie Linfield

The Happy Place

On Walt Kelly’s Pogo.

  • John Crowley

The Uses and Abuses of Photojournalism

Do we approach the photograph as spectators, or as citizens of the world?

  • Susie Linfield

The Cult of Authenticity

India’s cultural commissars worship “Indianness” instead of art.

  • Vikram Chandra

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A Strange Hybrid

A close look at post-Soviet commercial advertising reveals that market norms never really took hold—even among capitalists.

  • Svetlana Boym

The Mapplethorpe Moment

For the photographer, art happens when the heat of living and the ice of death meet.

  • Michael Bettencourt

Images of Apocalypse

The artwork of nuclear survivors.

  • Estelle Jussim

Philosophers on Photography

  • Pepe Karmel

An Interview with Eugene Richards

  • Eugene Richards
  • Maren Stange

The Ethnocentric Icon

Can photographers, unlike writers, leave their native land with impunity?

  • Estelle Jussim

William Carlos Williams in a World of Painters

His great achievement was to bring some of the qualities of painting into poetry.

  • Bonnie Costello

An Interview with Susan Sontag

Geoffrey Movius speaks with Susan Sontag about photography, writing, and memory.

  • Susan Sontag
  • Geoffrey Movius
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