October 12, 2026, issue

I want to respond to a couple of photography pieces in this week’s issue.

Vince Aletti, in his “Goings On: Justine Kurland,” reviews an exhibition of Kurland’s photos at Osmos gallery in Manhattan’s East Village. He likes the show. He calls Kurland “one of the most arresting, provocative, and unpredictable photographers around.” I confess I’m not a fan. A lot of her work seems posed. This doesn’t bother Aletti. He writes,

The show opens with two pictures from the color series that introduced Kurland to the world and became known as the “Girl Pictures”—cinematic shots of adolescent girls playing at being runaways. Under the photographer’s rapt gaze, theatricality melts away and we’re caught up in the sweet, casually intimate camaraderie of girls on an adventure. 

“Playing at being runaways” - right there is the problem. The girls are acting. The scenes are staged. And no, the theatricality doesn’t “melt away.” It’s right there in the deadness of the images. Peter Schjeldahl, commenting on Thomas Struth’s staged “Pergamon Museum” photos, said, “There is a subtle but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera.” This applies to Kurland’s photos, too. 

Justine Kurland, Blood Sisters (2000)

Contrast Kurland’s images with the work of Joseph Szabo. He’s the subject of Margaret Talbot’s “Photo Booth: The Era of Teen-Age Freedom,” also in this week’s issue. Talbot says,

The photographer Joseph Szabo’s pictures in the new book “American Teen” look timeless in certain ways—the crisp black-and-white of the images, the stately framing, the instantly recognizable, casual but charged, proximity of teen-agers hanging out, arms slung over their friends’ shoulders, heads tipped together, close enough to smell one another’s shampoo. Here they are, crammed together in the random corners they stake out on a big high-school campus, or thigh to thigh on a patchwork of beach towels, or whispering in one another’s ears, thick as thieves, magnetized by one another as by nobody and nothing else.

Joseph Szabo, American Teen

She goes on,

But there is also a sense in which these images belong, ineluctably, to the time in which most of them were made, the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, after Szabo had begun teaching photography and photographing students at Malverne High School, on Long Island. It’s not just the styles his subjects favor—abundant, feathered hair, high-waisted, slouchy jeans, ringer T-shirts, platform shoes, puka-shell necklaces. (In any case, some of their looks would read as hip today.) It’s not even the fact that the photos frequently show kids smoking cigarettes (though that’s certainly striking to see). The adolescent subjects of Szabo’s photos project something else: nearly all, even the ones who look shy or awkward or sidelined by their peers, have a kind of spontaneous presence, the loose-limbed, insouciant grace, even swagger, of subjects who have not been making and curating images of themselves and one another for as long as they can remember. 

Szabos subjects don’t look posed. They seem natural; they're just being themselves.

November 10, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Reading Margaret Talbot’s absorbing profile of Joachim Trier, I recalled the strange sequence in Trier’s great The Worst Person in the World, in which the film’s central character Julie is the only person moving; everyone else is frozen still. Why? What is Trier’s point? Talbot mentions this scene. She writes,

In an inventive scene in which Julie runs to find Eivind again, Oslo kindly stops and freezes for her—a sequence shot with extras standing stock still, not with C.G.I.—so that she can capture stolen time with him without having to end things yet with Aksel. 

So she can capture stolen time with him? I don’t know about that. Time stops for everyone else, but Julie keeps moving. Time doesn’t stop for her. Anthony Lane, in his illuminating review of the film, provides a different take. He says,

Or what about the instant at which the surrounding world—humans, vehicles, dogs, the flow of coffee from a pot—freezes in mid-action, allowing Julie, the solitary mover, to run through the motionless streets toward Eivind, whom she badly needs to embrace? How better to illustrate the ecstatic indifference with which, in the throes of a silly love, we obscure everything that is not our object of desire? 

To me, this makes more sense. Julie and Eivind are so absorbed in each other, it’s as if the rest of the world doesn’t register. They see only each other. All else is irrelevant. Trier’s freezing of the action around Julie is his way of showing the obsessive nature of romantic love. 

2. James Wood, in his excellent “Last Harvest,” reviews Georgi Gospodinov’s new novel Death and the Gardener. Wood likes it. He says, “This is inevitably a sad book in places, yet it is lit with remembered warmth, happiness, laughter, and a kind of lightness characteristic of its writer.” My favorite passage in Wood’s piece describes Gospodinov’s exploration of his childhood in the Sovietized Bulgaria of the nineteen-seventies and eighties: “These investigations are meticulous, tender, palpable: buildings and radios, cars and first kisses, songs and streets are all made newly alive in memory.”

3. Hannah Goldfield went to an awful lot of trouble to host a World Series party. She describes it in her wonderful “Tableau Vivant.” Here’s a sample:

On Thursday, the day before the game, I braised the pork shoulder and mixed the crab dip, feeling triumphant in my preparedness. On Friday afternoon, I found myself in an exhilarated fugue state. Doors and drawers flew open and shut as I broiled bananas covered in brown sugar, grilled steaks, and roasted pounds of wings. I chopped scallions, toasted sesame seeds, wrenched lids off of cans of beans and condensed milk. For hours, I thought of nothing but my next move, the narcotic draw of my phone blissfully suppressed. It didn’t go without a hitch. Fifteen minutes before my guests were due, the point at which Pelosi suggested I deep-fry the shrimp, I had failed to so much as set up my dredging station. I noticed that the black T-shirt I’d been wearing since 7 a.m. was smeared with whipped cream. The doorbell rang.

Wow! I hope Goldfield’s guests were appreciative. And I hope they rooted for the Jays. Otherwise, what a waste of great food.