‘The Gospel of the Hold Steady’ Captures Their Unhinged Magic
Michael Hann’s oral history The Gospel of the Hold Steady traces the band’s image, music, and challenges in a brilliant chronicle of the promise of rock ‘n’ roll.
photography
Patti Smith’s ‘A Book of Days’ Captures Much More Than Her Instagram Posts
Patti Smith’s A Book of Days creates an ironic loop of parasocial relationshipping, generating a kind of intimacy through photographs of objects.
Linda Simpson’s Photo History of NYC Drag Beguiles
Drag artist Linda Simpson shares her personal treasure trove of photographs to tell an important story about 1980s/’90s queer culture in The Drag Explosion.
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‘The New Woman Behind the Camera’ Exhibit Celebrates a Gaze of Her Own
The New Woman Behind the Camera, an exhibition of midcentury women photographers, captures the ways they documented a changing world and reimagined their place within it.
Dawoud Bey’s American Project
Photographer Dawoud Bey’s exhibit at the Whitney (now until 3 October) represents Blackness as an integral part of the American experience.
‘The Green Book’-Inspired ‘A Parallel Road’ and American Apartheid
Amani Willett's A parallel Road shows how controlling people's right to travel is central to the racist mindset.
Plattetopia: The Prefabrication of Utopia in East Berlin
With the fall of the Berlin Wall came the licence to take a wrecking ball to its nightmare of repression. But there began the unwritten violence of Die Wende, the peaceful revolution that hides the Oedipal violence of one order killing another.
The Story of Life in 10 1/2 Species (excerpt)
If an alien visitor were to collect ten souvenir life forms to represent life on earth, which would they be? This excerpt of Marianne Taylor's The Story of Life in 10 and a Half Species explores in text and photos the tiny but powerful earthling, the virus.
John Lewis, C.T. Vivian, and Their Fellow Freedom Riders Are Celebrated in ‘Breach of Peace’
John Lewis and C.T. Vivian were titans of the Civil Rights struggle, but they are far from alone in fighting for change. Eric Etheridge's masterful then-and-now project, Breach of Peace, tells the stories of many of the Freedom Riders.
Ivy Mix’s ‘Spirits of Latin America’ Evokes the Ancestors
A common thread unites Ivy Mix's engaging Spirits of Latin America; "the chaotic intermixture between indigenous and European traditions" is still an inextricable facet of life for everyone who inhabits the "New World".
Jeff Buckley’s Voice Returns
Jeff Buckley's journals, photographs, and memorabilia of the late singer are compiled by his mother, Mary Guibert, and Rolling Stone's David Browne in Jeff Buckley: His Own Voice.
Face: A Visual Odyssey (By the Book)
By turns alarming and awe-inspiring, Jessica Helfand's Face: A Visual Odyssey offers an elaborately illustrated A to Z—from the didactic anthropometry of the late 19th century to the selfie-obsessed zeitgeist of the 21st. Enjoy this excerpt of Face, courtesy of MIT Press.