March 9, 2026, Issue

I love photography writing. There’s an interesting piece by Hilton Als in this week’s New Yorker. It’s a review of “Eugène Atget: The Making of a Reputation” at the International Center of Photography. Als likes the show. He says he’s “grateful for any opportunity to investigate this essentially mysterious work, which pushes you away even as it pulls you in.”

I’m not sure what Als means when he says Atget’s photos “push you away.” Maybe he’s referring to their silence. He writes,

When I was younger and didn’t “get” Atget, I thought of his images as silent, with no action, no story. But now I can see that they are full of story—the story of time and its passage. My visits to the I.C.P. convinced me that Atget knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to make an epic record of time and place.

I like that passage, although I’d alter it slightly. Instead of “full of story,” I’d say “full of time and place.” Atget’s photos are an epic record of time and place. 

Postscript: Another excellent New Yorker piece on Atget’s photography is Anthony Lane’s “A Balzac of the Camera” (April 25, 1994). Lane says, “Atget stopped to absorb the detail that others failed to notice.” Right there, I think, is the essence of Atget’s brilliant art. 

Eugène Atget, Bourg-la-Reine, ferme Camille Desmoulins (1901)

Hilton Als' "William Eggleston's Lonely South"

William Eggleston, Untitled (1972)

I like the way Hilton Als interprets the above photo by William Eggleston. In his absorbing “Photo Booth: William Eggleston’s Lonely South” (The New Yorker, February 9, 2026), he writes,

The real stunner when it comes to showing us community is Eggleston’s 1972 image of a young Black woman, sitting in a church pew with other women of color, turning to look over her shoulder at the camera. The woman’s hair is straightened—“correct”—and she is thin; she wears a sleeveless, wine-colored dress, and the long fingers of her left hand rest on her left shoulder, partly hiding her mouth. It’s a powerful evocation of the psychology of beauty in the American South. Is she covering her mouth because she’s been made to see her lips as too big? Does she straighten her hair because the “natural” look has caught on only in big cities, where women have more freedom to express themselves, or is she simply trying to align herself with the older women she is sitting with, to be one with them? By looking at the white man behind the camera, is she doing something forbidden? We’ll never know. And it’s those many mysteries, rooted in the real and the possible, that continue to make photography in general, and Eggleston’s in particular, so fascinating.

Rather than read speculative narrative into Eggleston’s image, Als asks questions. He proceeds interrogatively. To me, this is the preferable way to go when dealing with an art as enigmatic as photography.  

November 17, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I enjoyed Hannah Goldfield’s “Takes” tribute to Anthony Bourdain’s “Don’t Eat Before Reading This.” She says,

The voice he introduced in “Don’t Eat Before Reading This” is not just brash and ballsy; it reverberates with style and poetry, from its tantalizing opening lines: “Good food, good eating, is all about blood and organs, cruelty and decay. It’s about sodium-loaded pork fat, stinky triple-cream cheeses, the tender thymus glands and distended livers of young animals. It’s about danger—risking the dark, bacterial forces of beef, chicken, cheese, and shellfish.”

Yes, I agree. Bourdain’s voice is transfixing. I first encountered it in The New Yorker’s great September 6, 2021 “Food & Drink” archival issue. The essay is called “Hell’s Kitchen.” It originally appeared in the April 17, 2000 New Yorker. What a piece of writing! It's a first-person-present-tense account of a day in Bourdain’s life as chef at the Manhattan restaurant Les Halles. Here's a sample:

It’s noon, and already customers are pouring in. Immediately, I get an order for pork mignon, two boudins, one calf’s liver, and one pheasant, all for one table. The boudins—blood sausages—take the longest, so they have to go in the oven instantly. First, I prick their skins with a cocktail fork so that they don’t explode; then I grab a fistful of caramelized apple sections and throw them into a sauté pan with some butter. I heat butter and oil for the pork in another sauté pan, throw a slab of liver into a pan of flour after salting and peppering it, and in another pan heat some more butter and oil. I take half a pheasant off the bone and place it on a sizzle platter for the oven, then spin around to pour currant sauce into a small saucepan to reduce. Pans ready, I sear the pork, sauté the liver, and slide the pork straight into the oven on another sizzler. I deglaze the pork pan with wine and stock, add sauce and some garlic confit, then put the pan aside; I’ll finish the reducing later. The liver, half-cooked, goes on another sizzler. I sauté some chopped shallots, deglaze the pan with red-wine vinegar, give it a shot of demiglace, season it, and put that aside, too. An order for mussels comes in, followed by one for breast of duck. I heat up a pan for the duck and load up a cold pan with mussels, tomato coulis, garlic, shallots, white wine, and seasoning. It’s getting to be boogie time.

“Prick,” “grab,” “throw,” “heat,” “throw,” “heat,” “take,” “place,” “spin,” “pour,” “sear,” “sauté,” “slide,” “deglaze,” “add,” “sauté,” “deglaze,” “give,” “put,” “heat,” “load” – over twenty action verbs. Bourdain's writing thrillingly enacts the kinetic reality of his Les Halles kitchen.

2. The title of Hilton Als’ piece (the newyorker.com version) caught my eye: “Robert Rauschenberg’s Art of the Real.” I thought to myself, Real? What’s real about it? Rauschenberg’s art isn’t real. It’s about as unreal as you can get. The art of the real is a matter of seeing things as they are. Rauschenberg fails this test. But after reading the piece, I get what Als is saying. He’s referring to Rauschenberg’s use of real materials – real tires, real quilts, real chairs, real bicycles. “Art is more powerful when it incorporates the real,” Als says. Okay, but look what Rauschenberg does with these real things. He combines them, daubs them with paint, and makes them his own. Look at Monogram (1955-59). A stuffed Angora goat girdled with a tire. Als describes it: 

The goat had a goatee, horns, and a long-haired silver torso. Its head and neck were streaked with several colors of paint, as though it had put on makeup while drunk. Not only that—there was a black-and-white rubber tire around its middle.

Als describes his youthful encounter with Monogram as “one of the more destabilizing experiences of my life.” I’m sure it was. Monogram is an unforgettable artwork. But it’s not realism – not even close. Some critics have suggested that it signifies anal sex: see, for example, Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (1981). Leo Steinberg found this interpretation too reductive. He saw the imposition of the tire as “an act of appropriation.” In his great Encounters with Rauschenberg (2000), he wrote,

As the artist would later encircle a car key with paint and a bicycle with neon tubing, so here – to make it his own. The goat alone – even with signature paint on its muzzle – did not look Rauschenbergian enough, until joined with its tire in definitive incongruity. 

Als, in his piece, also refrains from extracting any specific meaning from Monogram. The closest he comes is by asking these questions: 

I thought about “Monogram” ’s layers for years. I knew that goats in mythology were often mischievous, symbols of randiness and disorder—“queer” animals. Was that goat a combination of the real, the queer, and the mythic? Was I?

Robert Rauschenberg, Monogram (1955-59)

June 30, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Vince Aletti, in his mini-review of “Constellation,” a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, describes Arbus’s work as “tough, provocative, and brilliantly dark.” I agree. He also says that Arbus “isn’t easy to love.” This is also true. Aletti’s note reminded me of Susan Sontag’s great essay on Arbus – “Freak Show” [The New York Review of Books, November 15, 1973; included in her brilliant On Photography (1977) under the title “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly”]. It contains one of my favorite Sontag sentences: “Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.”

2. Hilton Als’ “Goings On” review of Gagosian Gallery’s “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” is illustrated with a reproduction of de Kooning’s “Suburb in Havana” (1958). It’s one of my favorite de Koonings. I first saw it in a piece by T. J. Clark called “Frank Auerbach’s London” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2015). Clark writes, 

If I’d been able to glimpse a de Kooning landscape from ten years earlier – say, Suburb in Havana from 1958 – lurking under Autumn Morning, I might have been a little less at sea. But the problem would only have shifted ground. I would still have had to sort out why and how de Kooning’s elegant, lavatorial graffiti – his Cuban-blue depth, the lavish decisiveness of his foreground ‘V’ – were turned in the Auerbach into a kind of waterlogged storm-streaked slipperiness. 

"Elegant lavatorial graffiti"? Ouch. Clark has thrown a barb. Is he right? 

3. A shout-out to photographer Heami Lee for her delectable pizza shot in Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Cactus Wren.”

4. And let’s give a huzzah for Alena Skarina’s wonderful, eye-catching illustration for Elizabeth Kolbert’s disconcerting “Seeds of Doubt.”

 

Who Should Succeed Schjeldahl?

Peter Schjeldahl (Photo by Alex Remnick)

Peter Schjeldahl is irreplaceable. Nevertheless, The New Yorker needs to have an art critic. Who are some of the possibilities? I see Hilton Als had an “Art World” piece in last week’s issue. But I'm not sure he’s the right guy for the job. He's too caught up in identity politics. I’d like to see someone in the position whose values are governed more by pleasure than anything else. And I’d like to see someone who writes with an unmistakable, idiosyncratic, formally coherent personal style. Here are some candidates I’d consider if I were picking the magazine’s new art critic: 

1. David Salle 

2. Wayne Koestenbaum

3. Gini Alhadeff

4. Susan Tallman

5. Johanna Fateman

The best living art writer is T. J. Clark. But his thinking might be a shade too metaphysical for the New Yorker job. The perfect choice is Salle: see his brilliant series of art pieces for The New York Review of Books. 

Gazelle Mba's "On Roy DeCarava"

Roy DeCarava, Hallway (1953)

Gazelle Mba’s “On Roy DeCarava" (London Review of Books, April 7, 2022) contains two wonderful descriptions of DeCarava’s work. She says of his Hallway (1953),

In the recent DeCarava retrospective at the David Zwirner gallery, Hallway stood out among the rows of silver gelatin prints. At first glance, it appears as a dense mass of what the curator Zoé Whitley called his ‘infinite palette of grey tonalities’, which take on volume in their shadowiness. It takes a second for your eyes to adjust, and to see the light in the background of the photo. A light that refuses illumination, a light that is no light. The two narrow walls converge into a vanishing point with no discernible horizon. The experience of seeing Hallway up close mimics what I imagine it was like to be there, unmoored, when everyone else had gone to bed. DeCarava seems to say that there is something about this light, this hallway, that won’t let him be, and he tries to draw out its meaning. He was fascinated by walls as an urban motif, walls so thin you can hear the neighbours yelling at their kids, walls that make you feel at home, crumbling walls with broken windows.

That “A light that refuses illumination, a light that is no light” is marvellously fine. Mba also provides an excellent description of DeCarava’s Graduation (1949):

Graduation (1949) shows a girl in white dress and white gloves, flowers pinned to her chest, jewellery about her neck and on her ears, her hair curled and styled to perfection. She is pristine. You sense the care and effort put into her appearance, the hours it took to get her looking this way. Sitting between some auntie’s legs while her hair was combed and pulled until it conformed to the desired style, the fabric for her dress and gloves sourced from the right place or bought new. Maybe the jewellery is an heirloom, reserved for moments like this. You would expect to find her at a ball, awash in bright light, surrounded by other tulled women, the air smelling like shea butter, hairspray and perfume mixed with peach schnapps for the grown-ups.

Instead she is alone in a vacant lot. Behind her is the skeleton of a demolished building, graffiti on the wall to her right, broken objects everywhere. There’s a pile of trash in the foreground, with a crumpled newspaper carrying a headline about South Korea. With the rest of the image in shadow, the girl stands in a square of light, walking forwards, calmly and deliberately, as if moving out of the weight and rubble of history into her own future. DeCarava happened on her by accident, but she knows where she’s going. The photograph seems to capture it all: wars, the state’s abandonment of Black urban centres, a young girl on her way to her graduation. But it doesn’t seek to synthesise these facts: no single one overwhelms or denies the existence of the others. Light and dark, mixed into DeCarava’s grey palette.

Those last two lines are inspired! The whole piece is inspired – a splendid appreciation of DeCarava’s subtle art. 

Postscript: See also Hilton Als’ terrific “Roy DeCarava’s Poetics of Blackness” (The New Yorker, September 23, 2019). 

July 26, 2021 Issue

I’m intrigued by Igshaan Adams’ cloud-like hanging sculptures. There’s a picture of one [“Getuie (Witness) VIII,” 2021] illustrating Hilton Als’ “At the Gallery,” in this week’s issue. Als describes them as “tumbleweeds of wire,” and this strikes me as exactly right, except that wire is just one of their ingredients. Other elements: metal, glass, rubber and stone beads, hoop earrings, chain, car paint, and resin. Several more are on view at caseykaplangallery.com, in its wonderful Igshaan Adams exhibition “Veld Wen.”  

Installation view of Igshaan Adams' "Getuie (Witness) VIII" (2021) and "Nagtreis Op N Vliende (A Night Journey On a Winged Horse)" (2021) (Photo by Jason Wyche) 

Amy Sillman's Gorgeous Blooms

One of the most beautiful online art shows I’ve seen recently is Amy Sillman’s “Twice Removed,” at the Gladstone Gallery, NYC. Hilton Als, in his “Goings On About Town: Art: Amy Sillman” (The New Yorker, October 19, 2020), says of it,

The splendor of Sillman’s new show at the Gladstone gallery lies in its restlessness. Working primarily in oil and acrylic on paper, canvas, and linen, the painter’s fecund imagination finds its expression, first, in a number of abstract images made up of bold dark lines that suggest Sillman’s interest in collage, less in terms of juxtaposing one texture next to another than in drawing, with paint, one image on top of another, the better to give fuller credence to both. These various collisions are very exciting, and come to rest in her paintings of flowers, which convey some of the lush despair and loneliness of van Gogh’s sunflowers and irises but are mostly about the spontaneity that is Sillman’s stock-in-trade: the flowers are the visual manifestation of her blooming mind.

I agree. Sillman’s blooms are delightful. Jason Farago, in his “Amy Sillman’s Breakthrough Moment Is Here" (The New York Times, October 8, 2020), writes,

The great shock of the Gladstone show are the smallest works here: the flowers she painted every morning, all alone in her humble North Fork rental as the virus spread and the temperatures rose. A posy of peonies, their petals rendered as splotches, dense as a bowling ball. A single drooping sunflower, and then a bouquet of them, in a simple jug.

Sillman’s online Gladstone exhibition brims with gorgeous abstracts and floral still lifes. I wish I could own one.

Credit: The above illustration is Amy Sillman's Untitled (2020).

Best of 2019: The Critics

Josh Cochran's illustration for Sarah Larson's "Home on the Range"

Here are my favorite New Yorker critical pieces of 2019 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Not Waving,” May 27, 2019 (“I was lucky to catch a rehearsal of a performance work by Brendan Fernandes that will take place at scheduled but infrequent times: five ballet dancers in black leotards strike varying poses on an arrangement of skeletal frameworks in black-painted wood. That was dreamy”).

2. James Wood, “Contents Under Pressure,” January 14, 2019 (“It’s a sign of how vital the rest of the book feels that a phrase like ‘caustic speech,’ which would be inoffensive enough in many novels, seems here irradiated with fakery”). 

3. Dan Chiasson’s “Freewriting,” October 14, 2019 (“The black bars of redacted text, which usually suggest narrative withheld, here reveal its true contours”).

4. Anthony Lane's “What If?,” July 8 & 15, 2019 (“Boyle, especially in the early scenes, provides acceleration; at the exact moment when Jack, standing at a bus stop, properly understands what the future holds, the camera hurries toward him like an excited kid”).

5. Alex Ross’s  “The Concerto Challenge,” March 25, 2019 (“The first movement follows the rudiments of sonata form, with the scampering opening material set against a slinky cantabile second theme that has a whiff of old Hollywood about it, as if Bette Davis were sipping a Scotch with the blinds drawn”).

6. Sarah Larson’s “Home on the Range,” February 4, 2019 (“The plot whirls along, heading inevitably toward collaborative writing, drunken mayhem, brandished golf clubs, existential crises, flying toast”).

 7. Alexandra Schwartz's “Painted Love,” July 22, 2019 (“She has the memoirist’s prerogative—this is how I remember it—and Picasso’s tyranny and brilliance are hardly in dispute”).

8. Hilton Als’s “Seen and Heard,” September 23, 2019 (“As in the Williams portrait, whiteness—here the whiteness of Horne’s turban, which sits like a beacon at the top of the image—is used to underline the blackness in the photograph, black skin and black as a color that leads to black feeling and thought”).

9. Janet Malcolm’s “The Unholy Practice,” September 23, 2019 (“The best intentions, however, can be broken on the wheel of skillful (or even inept) interviewing. Discretion so quickly turns into indiscretion under the exciting spell of undivided attention”).

10. Thomas Mallon's “Word for Word,” December 16, 2019 (“These changes alchemize a small piece of gold into a small piece of lead. Lowell slackens Hardwick’s prose into poetry, robs it of precision and pith”).

November 26, 2018 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Antony Huchette's snowy illustration for “Goings On About Town” ’s “Celebrating the Holidays” is delightful.

Antony Huchette, "Celebrating the Holidays" (2018)

2. Also in GOAT, Steve Futterman’s note on Carol Sloane at Birdland caught my eye, reminding me of Whitney Balliett’s 1987 Sloane profile, in which he describes her singing as “conversation put to music” (“Carol Sloane and Julie Wilson,” The New Yorker, April 6, 1987).

3. Frédéric Bazille’s gorgeous “Young Woman with Peonies” (1870), illustrating Hilton Als’ “At the Galleries: ‘Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet to Matisse to Today’ ” helps offset Janet Malcolm’s startling opinion, expressed in her recent “Six Glimpses of the Past,” that open peonies are “blowsy and ugly.”

Frédéric Bazille, "Young Woman with Peonies" (1870)

4. Peter Schjeldahl’s GOAT note on Dike Blair is a beauty, and is worth quoting in full:

Blair has been painting coolly beautiful little still-lifes of ordinary things in ordinary places for so long that, by now, they seem almost to paint themselves, for their own enjoyment. A pink cocktail luxuriates in a stemmed glass, never mind the somewhat gawky foreshortening of the tabletop that it shares with a cloth napkin and a bowl of nuts. Spatters of paint on a cement floor get a kick out of suggesting a frontal abstract painting, while still knowing perfectly well what they are. A yellow line and the shadow of a car bumper on a parking lot, water in a swimming pool, a torn-open FedEx envelope near a window fan, Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups, and a nodding tulip in a vase on a nighttime windowsill become unwilled memories—the almost, but not quite, meaningless retention of the small, sticky epiphanies that bind us to life.

5. Richard Brody reprises his brilliant capsule review of Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby” in this week’s “Goings On About Town,” and why not? It’s one of his best pieces. The last line is sublime: 

And Hawks brought to fruition his own universe of hints and symbols to conjure the force that rules the world: she tears his coat, he tears her dress, she steals his clothes, she names him “Bone,” and the mating cries of wild animals disturb the decorum of the dinner table, even as a Freudian psychiatrist in a swanky bar gives viewers an answer key.

6. Raffi Khatchadourian’s absorbing “Degrees of Freedom” tells about an extraordinary neuroscientific experiment in which a paralyzed woman’s brain is directly connected to a robotic arm. Khatchadourian is a superb describer of complex technological devices and procedures. His description of the implanting of the microelectrodes in the woman’s brain is unforgettable. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Then, suddenly, the injector was triggered. The sound of valves opening and closing filled the operating theatre, along with the rush of compressed air through the injector, the noise a lightning-quick mechanical breath, culminating in a metallic clink. In an instant, the ninety-six electrodes were in, like a soccer cleat going into soft earth.

Khatchadourian’s “Degrees of Freedom” is every bit the equal of his great “Transfiguration” (The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2012). I enjoyed it immensely. 

Best of 2016: Reporting

Photo by Jamie Hawkesworth

Here are my favorite New Yorker reporting pieces of 2016 (with a choice quote from each in brackets):

1. Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover,” August 29, 2016 (“He walked over to the kissing point and got down on his knees. He blew some fine dirt from the joint and ran a finger through the dust. His silver cross hung down. The picture was: artist, archeologist, supplicant, looking at an entrance to the underworld”).

2. Tad Friend, “Holding the T,” January 18, 2016 (“I sent him on a long scavenger hunt, then decoyed him in for a backhand drop and flicked it crosscourt into open space. At 9–10, I thumped a series of forehand rails and then whipped a crosscourt by him. Another crosscourt got me a game ball at 12–11, and a backhand volley, a perfect nick at the perfect time, closed it out”).

3. Nick Paumgarten, “The Country Restaurant,” August 29, 2016 (“Baehrel has concocted a canny fulfillment of a particular foodie fantasy: an eccentric hermit wrings strange masterpieces from the woods and his scrabbly back yard. The extreme locavore, pure of spade and larder. The toughest ticket in town. Stir in opacity, inaccessibility, and exclusivity, then powder it with lichen: It’s delicious. You can’t get enough. You can’t even get in”).

4. Janet Malcolm, “The Performance Artist,” September 5, 2016 (“She had come to tame the beast of a piece, this half-naked woman in sadistic high heels. Take that, and that, Beethoven!”).

5. Ian Frazier, “Patina,” September 19, 2016 (“When you have Statue of Liberty green on the brain, you see it all around you, especially on infrastructure. Being aware of the color somehow makes the city’s bindings and conduits and linkages stand out as if they’d been injected with radioactive dye. When you look for the color, the city becomes an electric train set you’re assembling with your eyes”).

6. Hilton Als, “Dark Rooms,” July 4, 2016 (“She had no interest in trying to show who they were under the feathers and the fantasy: she was in love with the bravery of their self-creation, their otherness”).

7. Jonathan Franzen, “The End of the End of the World,” May 23, 2016 (“Although the colony was everywhere smeared with nitric-smelling shit, and the doomed orphan chicks were a piteous sight, I was already glad I’d come”).

8. Jill Lepore, “The War and the Roses,” August 8 & 15, 2016 [“Either they were willing to have Trump speak in their stead (“I am your voice”), the very definition of a dictator, or else they wanted to speak for themselves, because the system was rigged, because the establishment could not be trusted, or because no one, no one, could understand them, their true, particular, Instagram selves”].

9. Carolyn Kormann, “The Tasting-Menu Initiative,” April 4, 2016 (“Carola Quispé, a former Gustu student, aimed the gun into a glass of foamy pink liquid and topped it off with smoke, then added a coca-leaf garnish. ‘It’s made with papa-pinta-boca-infused singani, lime juice, and egg whites, balanced with palo santo syrup,’ she said. It felt like drinking incense”).

10. Elizabeth Kolbert, “A Song of Ice,” October 24, 2016 (“One iceberg reminded me of an airplane hangar, another of the Guggenheim Museum. There was a sphinx, a pagoda, and a battleship; a barn, a silo, and the Sydney Opera House”).

Honorable Mention: Tom Kizzia, “The New Harpoon,” September 12, 2016.

Credit: The above photograph, by Jamie Hawkesworth, is from Dana Goodyear’s “The Earth Mover” (The New Yorker, August 29, 2016).

Contenders for "Top Ten Reporting Pieces" (So Far)

Illustration by Bjorn Lie (from Dana Goodyear's "Mezcal Sunrise")

Well, with only eight weeks left in the year, I want to start considering what my “Top Ten Reporting Pieces” might look like. Here are some of the contenders:

Ben Lerner, “The Custodians” (January 11, 2016)

Tad Friend, “Holding the T” (January 18, 2016)

Andrew O’Hagan, “Imaginary Spaces”  (March 28, 2016)

Dana Goodyear, “Mezcal Sunrise” (April 4, 2016)

Carolyn Kormann, “The Tasting-Menu Initiative” (April 4, 2016)

Dexter Filkins, “The End of Ice” (April 4, 2016)

Ian Frazier, “The Bag Bill” (May 2, 2016)

Lizzie Widdicombe, “Happy Together” (May 16, 2016)

Jonathan Franzen, “The End of the End of the World” (May 23, 2016)

Hilton Als, “Dark Rooms” (July 4, 2016)

Adam Gopnik, “Cool Running” (July 11 & 18, 2016)

Jill Lepore, “The War and the Roses” (August 8 & 15, 2016)

Nick Paumgarten, “The Country Restaurant” (August 29, 2016)

Dana Goodyear, “The Earth Mover” (August 29, 2016)

Janet Malcolm, “The Performance Artist” (September 5, 2016)

Tom Kizzia, “The New Harpoon” (September 12, 2016)

Ian Parker, “Knives Out” (September 12, 2016)

Burkhard Bilger, “Ghost Stories” (September 12, 2016)

Ian Frazier, “Patina” (September 19, 2016)

Elizabeth Kolbert, “A Song of Ice” (October 24, 2016)

These pieces are listed in the order they appeared in the magazine. Eventually, the list will have to be whittled down to ten – no easy task (they’re all excellent pieces). And I’ve learned from previous years not to decide prematurely. Last year, with about three weeks to go, I was sure Nick Paumgarten’s “Life Is Rescues” would be my #1 pick. Then Ben McGrath’s extraordinary “The Wayfarer” appeared, in the December 14 issue, and I had to revise my opinion (see here). By the way, where is McGrath? He’s a consistent Top Ten contender. But this year, he’s yet to appear. I miss him.  

July 4, 2016 Issue

This year's harvest of New Yorker photography writings has been particularly rich: “Lev Mendes’s “Philip Larkin’s Life Behind the Camera”; Chris Wiley’s “Joyful Forms: The Little-Known Photography of Ellsworth Kelly”; Anthony Lane’s “In the Picture.” Now, in this week’s issue, comes Hilton Als’s excellent “Dark Rooms,” a consideration of Nan Goldin’s 1986 collection The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Als describes Goldin’s book as “a benchmark for photographers who believe, as she [Goldin] does, in the narrative of the self, the private and public exhibition we call ‘being.’ ” He writes,

In the hundred and twenty-seven images that make up the volume proper, we watch as relationships between men and women, men and men, women and women, and women and themselves play out in bedrooms, bars, pensiones, bordellos, automobiles, and beaches in Provincetown, Boston, New York, Berlin, and Mexico—the places where Goldin, who left home at fourteen, lived as she recorded her life and the lives of her friends. The images are not explorations of the world in black-and-white, like Arbus’s, or artfully composed shots, like Mann’s. What interests Goldin is the random gestures and colors of the universe of sex and dreams, longing and breakups—the electric reds and pinks, deep blacks and blues that are integral to “The Ballad” ’s operatic sweep.

Those “electric reds and pinks, deep blacks and blues” are among the hallmarks of Goldin’s style. How did she achieve them? Als, quoting curator Elisabeth Sussman, offers this insight: “Goldin 'discovered her color in flashes of electricity. Even when photographing in natural light, she often unconsciously replicated the effect of artificial lighting.'"

My favorite passage in “Dark Rooms” is Als’s description of Goldin’s approach to her art:

Goldin didn’t photograph the so-called natural world. She photographed life business as show business, a world in which difference began on the surface. You could be a woman if you dressed like one. Or you could dress like some idea of yourself, a tarted-up badass woman, say, who struggles to break free from social decorum by doing all the things she’s not supposed to do: crying in public, showing her ectopic-pregnancy scars, pissing and maybe missing the toilet, coming apart, and then pasting herself back together again.

Als’s writing enacts the rawness of Goldin’s aesthetic. You can tell he identifies with it. I do, too. “Dark Rooms” is a superb piece of criticism. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: While I’m on the subject of New Yorker photography writing, I want to pay tribute to Vince Aletti, whose illuminating capsule reviews of photography exhibitions are among my favorite “Goings On About Town” features.   

April 18, 2016 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. I relished this "Goings On About Town" detail plucked from National Museum of the American Indian’s “Unbound: Narrative Art of the Plains”: “Plains artists, short on paper, used to draw on discarded ledger books. So does Dwayne Wilcox: in one drawing, a woman, resplendent in a Lakota robe, holds a smartphone that reads ‘r u at da pow wow.’ ”

2. And I enjoyed this line from “Goings On About Town” ’s note on Haris Epaminonda: “Think of her wooden fish regarding itself in the mirror as one of our primordial ancestors, contemplating evolution in our era of selfie-drenched narcissism.” (This is the newyorker.com version; the magazine version erroneously refers to “his rubber” fish.)

3. And I loved this “Goings On About Town” comment on photographer Scott Alario: “Alario reveals marvels in life’s minutiae, whether it’s steam curling up from a forkful of pasta or coolant streaming into a car’s radiator.”

4. Perhaps the most sheerly pleasurable sentence in this week’s issue is found in Wei Tchou’s "Bar Tab: Tomi Jazz": “On a recent Saturday night, as oil lamps flickered throughout a full house, a woman in a light-blue kimono nodded her head to the Standard Procedures, featuring the L.A.-based saxophonist Ray Zepeda, which was closing its set with a lively rendition of Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘A Night in Tunisia.’ ”

5. My takeaway from Elizabeth Kolbert’s absorbing "Unnatural Selection" is the notion of “assisted evolution” – human intervention in natural processes with the aim of improving corals’ and trees’ chances of survival. Kolbert’s description of donning a wetsuit made me smile: “The only suit in my size was an extra-thick one; getting into it made me empathize with any animal that’s ever been eaten alive by a boa.”

6. I was pleased to see Wayne Koestenbaum quoted in Hilton Als’s "Immediate Family." Koestenbaum is one of my favorite writers. I’m looking forward to his new book Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations.

7. Ariel Levy’s "Beautiful Monsters," an account of artist Niki de Saint Phalle's wild life, contains this gorgeous surreal line: “Walk downhill along the path that leads away from the Sphinx, and you are confronted by a voluptuous golden skeleton—Death—riding a blue horse over a mirrored green sea, from which disembodied arms stretch up to cling to the world of the living.”

8. I’m allergic to TV, but I read Clive James’s "Thrones of Blood" anyway because … well, because it’s by Clive James, one of the great essayists of our time. “Thrones of Blood” is terrific! Here’s a sample:

From Homer until now, and onward to wherever the creaking fleet of “Battlestar Galactica” may go in the future, there never was, and never will be, a successful entertainment fuelled by pure cynicism. And, when we click on Play All and settle back to watch every season of “The Wire” all over again, we should try to find a moment, in the midst of such complete absorption, to reflect that the imagined world being revealed to us for our delight really is an astounding achievement, even though we will always feel that we need an excuse for doing nothing else except watch it.

I could quote this piece endlessly. Savor this strange beauty: “John Hurt as Caligula in ‘I, Claudius’ ate the baby from his sister’s womb, whereas all Joffrey does is shoot a prostitute with his crossbow.”

9. I’m a fan of Dan Chiasson’s criticism. His "Mind the Gap," a review of Rosemarie Waldrop’s Gap Gardening, in this week’s issue, is excellent. In one of its best passages, Chiasson quotes a section of Waldrop’s “Hölderlin Hybrids” and beautifully analyzes it:

Waldrop’s poems aren’t “visual” in the sense that paintings are visual, but they feel as though they had been applied to paper, not simply written down, and they reward the kind of scrutiny we give to discrete visual surfaces. In a section from “Hölderlin Hybrids”:

Monet writes a friend he’s painting “the instant.” Succession stopped at success. A light his palette gives off. And color subdivided into into. On the retinal surface. Ground so fine. In each ray of light. Move motes of dust.

The passage is slyly mimetic of the painter’s process, his “succession” of brushstrokes suspended, like the word “succession,” when he reaches “success.” The halting sentence fragments are like synaptic flashes as the image passes from “palette” to “color,” from color transformed (“into” this or “into” that) to the eye and then to the gallery, where, aeons later, dust motes intervene.

That last sentence is inspired!