Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Dina Litovsky's Striking "Jessica West" Photo


Photo by Dina Litvosky for Helen Rosner's "What We're Buying for the Quarantine"

















One of the best New Yorker photos of the year (so far) is Dina Litovsky’s picture of an interesting looking woman named Jessica West, wearing sunglasses, surgical mask, and a beautiful textured brown-tan-orange sweater, standing in front of pallets loaded with boxes, bottles, and other subtly colorful items. The photo is one among several excellent Litovskys illustrating Helen Rosner’s “What We’re Buying for the Quarantine” (newyorker.com, March 18, 2020.

Litovsky first impinged my consciousness with her striking kubaneh-in-a-flowerpot photo for Silvia Killingsworth’s "Tables For Two: Timma" (The New YorkerOctober 26, 2015). That one made my “Best of 2015: Photos.”















Her sharp capture of Phil Young for Nicolas Niarchos’s “Tables For Two: Lenox Saphire” (January 2, 2017) was on my “Best of 2017: Photos.”













And I wouldn’t be surprised if her “Jessica West” appears on my “Best of 2020” list. 

Excellent work, Dina! 

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