Seeing War For What It Is: Ridiculous
War is not fashion and suffering is not funny. But the photo of this missile is both familiar and odd enough to seem uncanny.
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Through a Glass, Darkly: Visibility in Trump’s America
It seems to me that the news photo too often is showing us only the aftermath. Too much of the damage is being done off-stage.
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Getting Above the Chaos: Science, Photography, and Beauty
The world can seem lost to white noise and alternative facts, lurid emotions and garish displays of moral ugliness. Which may be why I find these images from the Observatory in Chile to be so comforting.
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Why Photographs Don’t Stop the War
Photographs may have long wave influence, but they don’t end wars or famines or otherwise stop history in its tracks.
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Aleppo as the 21st Century Hiroshima?
Considering how much conventional warfare is excused because it is assumed to be less destructive than nuclear weapons.
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Into the Twilight Zone in Nice
The world seems to be pitching into another reality, one that is more unreal than real, both present and still to come, and defined primarily by separation and violence, and by madness and helplessness.
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When Gag News Photos Are No Joke
Growing inequity leads to more demonstrations and other protests, and to violence. And to more gag photos.
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No One Thinking About Nuclear Summit? Listen to the Ruins.
The nuclear summit was important–unless, that is, you don’t mind having Your Town looking like this.
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The Ruins of the Space Program
If you liked the space program, it will be a mixed blessing. If you like ruins, however, you will feel right at home.
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Fashion Week: Visions of the 1%
One of the fashion themes this year is that wealth is here to stay.
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Star Wars Optics and Socialist Dreams
Incredible, isn’t it? So perfectly designed and yet so strange. Ultramodern and yet medieval, like a space ship on a surveillance mission and a castle readied for battle, set off by itself in forbidding isolation and yet connected somehow to distant galaxies. The tableau is so unique and so...
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The Latest Terror Attack and a 19th Century Painting
I doubt that the photographer was thinking of Caillebotte’s work when snapping the photo in Brussels, but the connection is there in several ways.
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Photographing the Refugee Crisis: The Significance of Less Context
Let me suggest that the more interchangeable the images, they more they point toward the full significance of this historical moment.
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Spring Time in the Dust Bowl
This photograph doesn’t tell us anything important that we don’t know, but it does provide the means to think about what we would rather ignore.
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Waiting for Peace to Arrive at the Syrian Bus Stop
Whatever the back story, the moral is the same: warfare demands exceptional resilience and inventiveness to survive, and people respond in kind. ...Which is why the scene is heartbreaking.
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The Problem With War is Not That it's Eternal, but That it's Persistent
There always has been war, there always will be war, and only fools think otherwise. Thus, the full honor due to those in battle today can be paid only by placing their memorial within the unbroken continuity and epic scale of myth.
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The Face of Battle in the Ukraine
War is far more than battle, from the extensive organization that is required to project power and hold territory, to the thousand ways that it disrupts, distorts, corrupts, and shatters entire worlds.
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Perhaps Our Images Provide Opportunities to Turn Terror Into Something Else
The central monument in a civic plaza, yet looking more like an idol demanding sacrifice, the image radiates a dark vibe across the urban space.
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