Top 10 Photographs with Words
I came to a career in photography from a background in literary studies, a move I’ve always explained to myself as a natural progression — photography is a narrative medium. I’ve always loathed the presence of text in visual art. Years of working in coffee shops — the kinds that notoriously serve as both incubators for and final resting places of so many poetry-plastered collages — and my own adolescent scrawlings, have resulted in a hard stop for me and pensive / provocative / cursive writing of any kind on anything I’m meant to take seriously in a gallery setting. With the obvious exception of a sculpture my cousin made in high school, on which she’d written “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.” That is
absurd, but she is incredible and doing quite well for herself as an actual artist, so coffee shops are of course important.
All that being said, I fucking love a photograph with words in it. These ten photographs bring together artists who’ve shaped the medium in deeply personal and varied ways: William Klein, whose brash vision reshaped how we read the street; Sally Mann, whose portraits of adolescence remain some of my most visceral favorites; Steve Schapiro, who photographed history with wide empathy; Paul McDonough, one of New York’s sharpest observers; Elliott Erwitt, the unrivaled master of humor and humanity; Vivian Maier, whose archive keeps rewriting the canon; Justine Kurland, whose irreverence feels urgent now; Harlan Bozeman, demanding that erased histories be named; Peter Kayafas, who finds lyricism in the overlooked; and Mark Steinmetz, whose work — time and again — marks the gentle passing of time for me. Together, they remind me why text in photographs matters — not to clarify the story, but to complicate it.
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