A very thick copy of Foto 8 magazine came through my door the other day, but I haven’t had time to read it properly yet. But it does include a number of interesting features, including two by photographers I’ve previously written about, Michael Grieve and Edmund Clark. You can take a look at this twice a year publication online, but really you need to see the real thing – and the best way is to take out a subscription – and there is a special 50% offer on new and gift 2 Year Subscriptions until 16 December. It’s probably the best magazine in the world covering photojournalism.
Foto 8 also has a lot of content on-line in its blog, including an interesting interview in which Tod Papageorge talks to Mark Durden, in particular about Garry Winogrand and Susan Sontag. Here’s a quote:
Its always been puzzling to me that capacious minds like Sontags … look at a photograph and see not a picture, but the literal world held in their palm. With that, theyre revealing themselves to be no more sophisticated than the proverbial tribesman who believes that a photograph made of him steals a piece of his soul.
You can see more of Papageorge’s photography at the Pace/McGill Gallery.
Papageorge has always impressed me more as a writer than as a photographer, and in particular for his 1981 book ‘Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence‘. The book is long out of print, but the text – without the pictures it refers to – is available on the web as the first of a series, The Missing Criticism on Eric Etheridge‘s ‘Mostly Photos‘ blog.
The second article in this series, also by Papageorge, is his 2002 essay ‘What We Bought‘ on the work published under that title by Robert Adams in 1995. Unfortunately by that date I’d stopped buying every new book by Adams, as this first edition now sells for around £400 (but I do have first editions of the even more expensive ‘Denver‘ and ‘The New West‘, though like most of my books my copies are well-thumbed.) But newer editions of these books are available – and you can buy ‘What We Bought’ in and edition published by Yale University Press (Papageorge became Director of Graduate Study in Photography at the Yale School of Art in 1979) for £30 or less.