A cacophony of life, death, and perfume ads, transmitted across the same frequency, VanDerBeek’s fax collages captures an “international picture language.”
Julia Curl
Julia Curl is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. Her research focuses on avant-garde film and photography, particularly in relationship to literature. She curates film programming for the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and William Burroughs’s former apartment, the Bunker.
The Surreal Realism of Buñuel’s Mexican Films
Luis Buñuel believed that surreal moments were necessary to achieve a true documentary style, as they reflect the fantastical, mysterious nature of everyday reality.
Takako Saito Made Fluxus Fun
“I don’t want people to be an audience,” the artist explained in a 2014 interview, “I want everybody to be participants. Everybody involved!”
How peter campus Changed the Video Art Game
“Three Transitions” from 1973 depicts a slippery reality that thwarts the notion of video as an inherently “documentary” medium.
Carla Williams Takes Ownership of the Gaze
Williams’s scholarly interest in the Black female form paralleled a decades-long private photographic practice that began in the 1980s.
Jay DeFeo Put a Lens Up to the World
Recently discovered work demonstrates DeFeo’s status as a major contemporary photographer.
A Global History of Women’s Photography Includes Over 300 Artists
This book unearths a trove of unseen images from the past two centuries.
The “Society Photographer” of NYC’s Downtown Underground
Jimmy DeSana’s work remains transgressive, even by today’s standards.
Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Misunderstood Oeuvre
Critics who have deemed the photographer couple’s work outmoded and detached are simply wrong.
Pierre Clémenti, Rebel With a Cause
The French director made his films with his own earnings as an actor, not for monetary gain or widespread recognition but as a form of self-realization.
Women’s Photography as a Tool of Resistance
What is a feminist picture? A MoMA exhibition is the latest to attempt to answer this question.
Jean Painlevé Revealed the Otherworldliness Beneath the Water’s Surface
His detailed images of microscopic aquatic creatures suggest a version of Surrealism’s dream realities.