Critique
Critique is the regular Eye column by Rick Poynor.
Banquet of images
For its 50th anniversary, the Arles festival stages a
generous array of contemporary and historical…
Nature in captivity
Luigi Ghirri’s rigorously composed pictures of plants outside people’s homes exercise a banal…
A confederacy of lunches
A text-only book argues that ‘social’ photography is more about self-documentation than aesthetics. By…
Posters for the people
Photographs by the Polish designer Wojciech Zamecznik investigate the use of posters as public…
Catalogue of things
A close relative’s colour slides show a densely layered record of everyday life. Photo Critique by Rick…
From out of the blue
Volume one of Anna Atkins’ beautiful study of British algae, issued in 1843, was the first ever…
Awkward objects
The tradition of the painted still life has been reinvented by contemporary photographers with pictures…
Streets without people
Emigre’s Rudy VanderLans explores the clotted terrain of Tokyo’s Shibuya and Shinjuku districts with the…
Hole in the head
An artful book of deliberately torn, anonymous photographs from the Cold War era leaves many questions…
Cinematic view
A recent edition of Aperture examines the enduring affinity between two art forms. Photo Critique by Rick…