Best of 2021: Photos

Here are my favorite New Yorker photos of 2021:

1. Jerome Strauss’s photo for “Above & Beyond: The Annual Arrival of Cherry Blossoms,” April 19, 2021 (see above);

2. Amy Lombard's portrait of Jake Paul for Kelefa Sanneh's "Punching Down" (November 8, 2021);

3. Brian Emfinger's photo for Heidi Julavits's "The Fire Geyser" (August 23, 2021);

4. Lakin Ogunbanwo's portrait of El Anatsui for Julian Lucas's “Structure and Flow” (January 18, 2021);

5. Gus Powell's photo for Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: Smashed NYC" (June 7, 2021);

6. Thomas Prior's portrait of Kate Orff for Eric Klinenberg's "Manufacturing Nature" (August 9, 2021);

7. Naila Ruechel's photo for Judith Thurman's "Eye of the Needle" (March 29, 2021);

8. William Mebane's photo for Hannah Goldfield's "Tables for Two: Dame" (January 25, 2021);

9. Sofia Yates's photo for Hannah Goldfield's "Tables For Two: Rolo's" (February 8, 2021);

10. Phyllis Ma's photo for Hannah Goldfield's "Tables For Two: The New Carry-Out Cuisine" (June 21, 2021).

Echoes and Reverberations

Photo by Thomas Prior, from Eric Klinenberg's "Manufacturing Nature"

One of the pleasures of being a long-time New Yorker reader is noticing the connections. Five recent examples:

1. Eric Klinenberg, in his excellent “Manufacturing Nature” (August 9, 2021), mentions Brooklyn’s Plum Beach: “On a cold day this spring, Orff met me at Plumb Beach, a short, narrow stretch of shoreline at the southern edge of Brooklyn, and a nesting-and-breeding ground for horseshoe crabs.” I read that and immediately thought of Ian Frazier’s “Blue Bloods” (April 14, 2014), a brilliant piece on horseshoe crabs set, among other places, on Plum Beach (“Farther along the beach, Russian fishermen stood beside their belled fishing poles, impassive and unimpressed as only Russians can be. They had lit fires of damp straw to keep the bugs away; the sharp-smelling smoke coiled around”). 

2. In his piece, Klinenberg visits the wetlands that jut out from the mouth of the Mississippi River. This is a landscape that Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about in her memorable “Under Water” (April 1, 2019): “So thick with simulated sediment were the channels of the Bird’s Foot that they looked as if they were filled with ink.”

3. Also in his piece, Klinenberg mentions the federal levees that line the Mississippi. This triggered a remembrance of John McPhee’s great “Atchafalaya” (February 23, 1987), a piece on the construction of the levees by the Corps of Engineers: "Three hundred miles up the Mississippi River from its mouth—many parishes above New Orleans and well north of Baton Rouge—a navigation lock in the Mississippi’s right bank allows ships to drop out of the river."

4. Elizabeth Kolbert, in her absorbing “The Lost Canyon” (August 16, 2021), refers to the Colorado River Compact, a subject covered in David Owen’s superb “Where the River Runs Dry” (May 25, 2015). Owen, in his piece, travels the length of the Colorado, noting the many signs of water crisis ("Hinojosa Huerta explained that the embankment was a levee, built to protect locals from the river—a function almost impossible to imagine, because the channel of the Colorado was a mile to our east, and there was nothing between it and us but desert"). Kolbert focuses on the alarming depletion of Lake Powell, a giant man-made reservoir on the Colorado. Her piece could be considered a companion to Owen’s report.

5. Also in her piece, Kolbert mentions Floyd Dominy, commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation in the nineteen sixties and Glen Canyon Dam’s biggest booster. Dominy is one of four men profiled in John McPhee’s masterful “Encounters with the Archdruid” (March 20, 27 & April 3, 1971): "Dominy begins to talk dams. To him, the world is a tessellation of watersheds. When he looks at a globe, he does not see nations so much as he sees rivers, and his imagination runs down the rivers building dams."

So lots of echoes and reverberations! They add an extra layer of meaning to my New Yorker reading experience. 

"New Yorker" Portrait Photos and the Problem of the Pose

Zora J. Murff, "Clarissa Glenn and Ben Baker"

I like portraits that look me straight in the eye. They seem more natural. They confront the problem of the pose (what Michael Fried, in his Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, calls its “inherent theatricality”) head-on. Lately, New Yorker photography has favored averted eyes. Portrait subjects look down; they look away; they don’t look at the camera. For example: 

Krista Schlueter’s “David Hockney” (from Françoise Mouly’s “Cover Story: David Hockney’s ‘The Road,’ ” newyorker.com, April 16, 2018)

 

Anne Golaz’s “Poul Andrias Ziska” (from the newyorker.com version of Rebecca Mead’s “Meal Ticket,” June 18, 2018)

Gillian Laub’s “Alex Katz” (from Calvin Tomkins’s “Painterly Virtues,” August 27, 2018)

Pari Dukovic’s “Martin Amis” (from Thomas Mallon’s “House Style,” February 5, 2018)

Jamie Campbell’s “Sheila Heti” (from Alexandra Schwartz’s “To Have and to Do,” May 7, 2018)

Ilona Szwarc’s “Bo Burnham” (from Michael Schulman’s “The Awkward Age,” July 2, 2018)

Irina Rozovsky’s “Courtney Barnett,” (from Amanda Petrusich’s “Wry Wonder,” May 21, 2018)

These are all gorgeous portraits. But, to me, there’s an element of fiction in them: the subject knows he or she is being photographed, yet pretends otherwise. I prefer the classic pose in which the subject looks directly at the camera. Here are five of my all-time favorites:

1. Davide Monteleone’s "Su Xiaolan" (from “Portfolio: A New Silk Road,” January 8, 2018)

2. Benjamin Lowy’s “Latham Smith” (from Burkhard Bilger’s “Towheads,” April 19, 2010)

3. Nadine Ijewere’s "Lynette Yiadom-Boakye" (from Zadie Smith’s “A Bird of Few Words,” June 19, 2017)

4. Dan Winters’ "Pardis Sabeti and Stephen Gire" (from Richard Preston’s “The Ebola Wars,” October 27, 2014)

5. Thomas Prior’s "Irad and Jose Ortiz” (from John Seabrook’s “Top Jocks,” December 4, 2017)

Credit: The above photo by Zora J. Murff is from Jennifer Gonnerman's "Framed" (The New Yorker, May 28, 2018).

Best of 2017: Photos

 Mauricio Lima, "Women and Children Mourning the Death of Two Kurdish Soldiers" (2017)

Here are my favorite New Yorker photographs of 2017:

1. Mauricio Lima’s “Women and Children Mourning the Death of Two Kurdish Soldiers,” for Luke Mogelson’s “Dark Victory” (November 6, 2017).

2. Mauricio Lima’s “Female Fighters for the Syrian Democratic Forces," for Luke Mogelson’s “Dark Victory” (November 6, 2017).

3. Thomas Prior’s “Irad and Jose Ortiz,” for John Seabrook’s “Top Jocks” (December 4, 2017).

4. William Mebane’s “Tim Ho Wan,” for Jiayang Fan’s “Tables For Two: Tim Ho Wan” (April 17, 2017).

5. Victor J. Blue’s “Captain Basam Attallah Shoots at a Cache of ISIS Explosives,” for Luke Mogelson’s “The Avengers of Mosul” (February 6, 2017).

6. Daniel Shea’s “Peter Doig,” for Calvin Tomkins’s “Somewhere Different” (December 11, 2017).

7. Nadine Ijewere’s “Lynette Yiadom-Boakye,” for Zadie Smith’s “A Bird of Few Words” (June 19, 2017).

8. Dina Litovsky’s “Phil Young,” for Nicolas Niarchos’s “Tables For Two: Lenox Saphire” (January 2, 2017).

9. Nadav Kander’s “Julian Assange,” for Raffi Khatchadourian’s “Man Without a Country” (August 21, 2017).

10. Amy Lombard’s “Sexy Taco/Dirty Cash,” for Nicolas Niarchos’s “Tables For Two: Sexy Taco/Dirty Cash” (February 6, 2017).

December 4, 2017 Issue

This week’s New Yorker brims with piquant details: “seagulls, nominally and stickily rendered, as if piped on with black icing” (“Goings On About Town: Art: Whitney Museum: ‘Laura Owens’ ”); “Yvette, a raw industrial duo whose jagged tracks should come with cautionary signage” (“Goings On About Town: Night Life: Eaters”); “black-garlic jam (if mahogany had a flavor it would be this)” (Shauna Lyon, “Tables For Two: Ferris”); the white bones of a dead raccoon’s hand that “seemed to reach / out toward the sun as it hit the water, / showing all five of his sweet tensile fingers / still clinging” (Ada Limón, “Overpass”); the mud-encrusted riding goggles in Thomas Prior’s striking color portrait of Puerto Rican jockeys Irad and Jose Ortiz, illustrating John Seabrook’s excellent “Top Jocks”; Paolo Pellegrin’s arresting black-and-white photos of reed huts for Ben Taub’s absorbing “The Emergency”; the roll of adding-machine tape on which A. R. Ammons composed his great “Tape for the Turn of the Year” (“The poem’s margins were set by the tape’s width, about two inches; it began where the tape started and ended when it ran out, with no chance for revisions as Ammons’s words slalomed down its length”: Dan Chiasson, “One Man’s Trash”); Alexander Calder’s “kinetic, wire-and-collage miniature circus, complete with a full cast of characters, from ringmaster to strongman,” made “creature by creature, out of wire bent with pliers, and powered by everything from springs to balloons” (Adam Gopnik, “Wired”).