Showing results by narrator "Dana Brewer Harris" in All Categories

When Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont, announced that two oxen called Bill and Lou would be killed and turned into hamburgers despite their years of service as unofficial college and town mascots, Pattrice Jones and her colleagues at nearby VINE Sanctuary offered an alternative scenario: to allow the elderly bovines to retire to the sanctuary. What transpired after this simple offer was a catastrophe of miscommunication, misdirection, and misinterpretations, as the college dug in its heels, activists piled on, and social media erupted. Part true-crime mystery, part on-the-ground reportage, and part sociocultural critique, The Oxen at the Intersection is a brilliant unearthing of the assumptions, preconceptions, and biases that led all concerned with the lives and deaths of these two animals to fail to achieve their ends.

Alice Liddell, sweetly dignified, the inspiration for the heroine of Alice in Wonderland, is posed and identified as Pomona, goddess of abundance, in a marvelous 1872 photograph by the irrepressible Julia Margaret Cameron; appropriately she is the cover girl for this lavish standalone publication, which also acted as the catalogue accompanying the recent exhibition of the same title at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, (October 31 2010-January 30 2011), and the Museé d'Orsay Paris, March 6 - May 29, 2011).

Linnaeus Tripe? Shades of a minor character in Dickens or Trollope, but in fact the resoundingly named Tripe (1822-1902), army officer and photographer, was the sixth son and ninth child of a professional middle-class family from Devonport, his father a surgeon in the Royal Navy. He joined, as so many of his background did - younger son, but of a certain social status - the East India Company's army (the 12th Madras Native Infantry) aged only 17, the third Tripe son to do so.

EM Forster's famous dictum "Only connect!" is often quoted out of context but it is a resoundingly emotive phrase which might also be taken as the motto for the first major excursion by the National Gallery, London, into the history, portent and meaning of photography as a medium. Before Seduced by Art: Photography Past and Present, the National Gallery has only exhibited the work of a contemporary photographer on one occasion.

Marina Vaizey reviews the work of Julia Margaret Cameron, Victorian photographer, exhibited at the Victoria and Albert, and Science Museum London.

This ample exhibition - 150 or so photographs, and a small complementary display of well chosen magazines, showing a succinct number in published form - by Man Ray (1890-1976) is described as the first to concentrate exclusively on his portraits. He was born in Philadelphia as Michael Emmanuel Radnitzky, the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants (the father's classic occupation for someone of his ethnicity and class that of a tailor); the family moved to Brooklyn in 1897, the first of Man Ray's advantageous geographical relocations.

The dazzling exhibition of Horst at the Victoria and Albert is particularly apt: classically trained in avant garde design and architecture, Horst was involved as a precociously successful photographer for Condé Nast publications, not only with the leading fashion houses, but the social and artistic élite. And he took sustained inspiration from the isms of art - past and present. In the thirties he photographed costumes by Dali and used props from Giacometti furniture. Dali designed a set for a photograph for Horst to take for American Vogue, with dresses by Hattie Carnegie.

In a 1968 photograph a US Marine pauses for thought, inadvertently echoing those renaissance paintings of meditating scholars, holding his helmet rather than a book - but this is a quiet moment in the battle for Hue. It is McCullin's photographs which helped to define the savage war in Vietnam for Britain, and beyond. Some is unbearably sad: a young North Vietnamese soldier, a casualty of Hue, stares sightlessly at the photographer, his hands outstretched to the detritus of his pockets, scattered on the earth beside the body.

One of Shakespeare's most often quoted lines, from Hamlet, simply asserts that "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy." The current retrospective at Tate Britain of the art of Richard Long, the first in London since the Arts Council's Hayward Gallery show in 1991, has been titled Heaven and Earth by Long himself, a phrase he had earlier used for specific works of art.

The extraordinary exhibition of thousands of photographs ranging from cumbersome, beautifully detailed, sharply acute photographs of the aftermath of the 1860s American Civil War to mundane landscapes taken in 2013, are based on an enlivening, provocative, and even perhaps controversial organizing principle. What is novel is the unusual premise: eschewing more conventional and immediate reportage, or documentary series, the selection moving from gallery to gallery - and section by section in the catalogue - is defined by time.

Major discoveries can still be made in the field of visual art, but few perhaps are quite so surprising as the current first retrospective devoted to the French photographer Camille Silvy at the National Portrait Gallery, London (to October 24).

It is an enthralling and unexpected selection, and the anthology resonates beyond this showing. It is from the Eric and Louise Franck collection, which has been donated to the Tate, and is part of the process by which the gallery has very belatedly, but with almost overwhelming enthusiasm, entered into collecting and showing photography as a medium in in its own right, with a very active patrons group supporting acquisitions. One of the benefits of Tate joining the fray is evident in the installation of this show.

Several hundred photographs of varying scales, and most of them newly printed gelatin silver prints, in superb tones of greys, blacks, and whites, take us into a world that has been subliminally familiar to us for nearly 50 years. Stardust is the title given to this self-selected retrospective, three years in the making, the photographer his own curator, and the word neatly encapsulates the fascinating conundrum of photography itself. As Bailey himself puts it, "It's not the camera that takes the picture, it's the person," and these photographs are as much about Bailey as his subject.

Reviews events in the London Festival of the Cultural Olympiad. Writer Alexandra James visits a variety of exhibitions, music, and performances, staged through July 2012, witnessing a range of creative voices drawn from the international arena.

Once upon a time in Düsseldorf, in the 1970s, there was an astonishing art academy, the Kunstakademie, with amazing teachers, and amazing students. Düsseldorf was a very proud art city, and even published at the time, a book of photographs called Düsseldorf City of Artists. The presence of that great, messianic leader, Joseph Beuys loomed large. Gerhard Richter, (and Gotthard Graubner among others), taught painting, and an outstanding couple, Bernd and Hilla Becher, taught photography.

Education, employment, and home ownership have long been considered stepping stones to the middle class. But in Abandoned Families, social policy expert Kristin Seefeldt shows how many working families have access only to a separate but unequal set of poor-quality jobs, low-performing schools, and declining housing markets, which offer few chances for upward mobility. Through in-depth interviews over a six-year period with women in Detroit, Seefeldt charts the increasing social isolation of many low-income workers.