Photography

Picture London in the Swinging Sixties and you think of King’s Road boutiques, David Bailey, models in Soho coffee bars. Sam Haskins, whose work is about to go up for auction at Sloane Street Auctions, was one of the photographers whose work helped shape the visual language of the 1960s. So it’s surprising to learn that at the time, he wasn’t anywhere near any of it. In fact, he…

If you shoot portraits for a living, August Sander is a name you should know. His decades-long People of the 20th Century, for one, is a landmark in the discipline’s history. An attempt to catalogue a cross-section of society by trade and social type, it set the template that Diane Arbus, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and ultimately portraiture in general would build from. If, for instance…

Alina Marazzi’s The Girl with the Leica opened at the Venice Film Festial this month, and most of the coverage so far has focused on what it gets right and wrong as a biopic. The mannered performances, the jazz-age dance numbers, the tangle of lovers and émigré friends circling Emilia Schüle’s Gerda Taro; all good things for a film reviewer to explore. But as a writer for Digital…

There’s a particular kind of photography that’s often a tough sell to the arty crowd. Deadpan shots of a humdrum world, boasting nothing obviously “clever” about them beyond good light and a clean composition. It’s the kind of work that might look so simple that anyone could take it. On closer inspection, though, you realize how much discipline it takes to resist the…