Only 500 copies of Alexey Brodovitch’s “Ballet” were printed when it was published in 1945, yet this modest artist’s book would come to have a seismic influence on the course of photography. Like the rarest works in the genre — “The Americans” by Robert Frank (1958) or “Evidence” by Mike …
Jeff Bridges taught her how to drive in his Volkswagen bus. Steven Spielberg refused to flirt with her. She successfully talked the actor Rip Torn out of assaulting the director Nicolas Roeg on a movie set. While lying on a beach in Mexico with the painter Ed Ruscha, she was …
We asked 19 photographers to revisit their most enduring images of the coronavirus pandemic, five years after the virus became a global threat. Their photographs transport us to that bewildering period in an uncanny sort of time travel. The journalists who captured these scenes were not just covering the Covid-19 …
Memories fade. Documentation disappears. Scenes vanish. When you’re busy creating a world, you don’t always think about how to preserve it for history. So old fliers and magazines get brittle and crumble, photos get lost, publications go out of business and websites get deleted. It falls to archivists — sometimes …
For 30 miles we bounce along a dirt road in southwestern Wyoming, heading toward a jagged skyline. It’s early September and the aspens are starting to turn yellow. As we climb toward the mountains, the air grows colder. Soon the road will see snowfall. Jeff Munroe, a professor of geology …
Mary Ellen Matthews was trying to make the cast of “Saturday Night Live” look funny. Bouncing around a studio in Lower Manhattan in cowboy boots last week, she lobbed suggestions at four cast members like the leader of an improv troupe. “Group hug!” “How about a trust fall?” “You guys …
How did the photographer Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, go from hard-boiled shots of New York murder victims, criminal arrests and tenement fires during the 1930s and ’40s — classic images that have never been equaled — to the cheesy distorted portraits of Hollywood celebrities that engaged him for …
On Aug. 18, 1959, George Tice was a Navy photographer’s mate third class on the aircraft carrier Wasp when an explosion in a hangar bay rocked the ship in the Atlantic Ocean, about 250 miles from Norfolk, Va. He rushed to the flight deck, camera in hand, and took pictures …
Last August, over a calm Michigan lake, Karl Duesterhaus, 34, of Chicago, was treated to an unusual phenomenon: the northern lights, which appeared as hazy colors in a brighter-than-usual night sky. It was a cool experience, he said, but he was surprised when he looked at cellphone photos taken the …