Professor Lucy Sante Reviews the Work of Annie Leibovitz, Harry Gruyaert, Gilles Peress, Catherine Opie, and More for the New York Times
Documenting the Troubles in Northern Ireland, these “two enormous volumes of plates, the size of 19th-century ledgers, and an accompanying almanac” provide the reader with something unique, Sante writes, “not a timeline but a series of existential crises that recur like rituals, that also play out in headlines, TV news footage and, above all, graffiti, rises in waves and recedes into choppiness, as capacious as a 19th-century novel but as indeterminate as an ocean.” Gilles’ photos are “never at rest,” she writes, with violence “always imminent if not present.”
Sante goes on to review a bevy of books by other “masters of the form,” including new work by Annie Leibowitz and Catherine Opie. Calling Opie “a portraitist of unusual poise,” whose subjects are often “trans people, butch lesbians, [and] fetishists of diverse sorts,” Sante writes that Opie’s “stately presentations have done much to infuse dignity into their public perception.” Later, reviewing work by Mitch Epstein, who “works like a nonfiction writer,” Sante notes his skill as a sort of aesthetic documentarian. “His photographs are always lucid and eloquent,” she writes, “and often very beautiful despite their grim subjects.”
Post Date: 12-07-2021