It took me until today to understand what the word “hipster” has come to mean. When I heard people complaining about neighborhoods infested with hipsters, bars ruined by hipsters, I didn’t really give it much thought beyond remembering Yogi Berra’s lament: “The place is too crowded–nobody goes there anymore.” The red herring was the word … Read more

I have a great many pictures of the dead. But I don’t have many pictures of my own dead. I mean the people I knew who died when they and I were young. Who died of drugs and Aids and suicide and misadventure. For the most part my friends and I didn’t have cameras. We … Read more

Just what is it that makes today’s culture so different, so appealing? Anticipating Richard Hamilton by four years, Hank Williams first uttered the term pop art from the stage of the Grand Old Opry in 1952. Hank could see stretched out before him a future in which art would inextricably entwine with advertising. It was … Read more

In 1985, an unknown person briefly went around tearing down sections of compacted poster-gneiss from the walls of lower Manhattan, mounted them on light stock, and sold them as postcards. I’m very sorry I only bought one; I probably thought they’d be around longer than a month. The unknown person was perhaps aware that he … Read more

I can very nearly zero in on the exact year in which this picture was taken. 1972, I’m guessing. The conjunction of those fuck-me shoes with those floor-dragging bells in that pool-table backroom of that bar. I can hear the music, smell the drugs. No earlier than 1971, anyway, and probably no later than about … Read more

Is the mugshot the only true portrait? Is every other approach to portraiture a fiction based loosely on the physical appearance of a given human being? What is a mugshot? Is a mugshot strictly a photograph taken by the police to identify a suspect? Or can the definition be extended? When we say that a … Read more

She did a little stripping at the Lido, a little chorus work at the Moulin Rouge, a little cocktail hostessing here and there. She got her face into the margins of society photos now and then, somewhere behind Cocteau’s shoulder or beneath Zizi Jeanmaire’s hairdo. She came from Bergerac and kept in touch only with … Read more

Can of Ruppert Knickerbocker “opened with an axe,” as it says on the back of the print. Ruppert was the last beer brewed in Manhattan and the most godawful pisswater ever, although it may have been better back when Colonel Ruppert owned the Yankees. It was also the cheapest beer sold in New York circa … Read more

At one time the news arrived this way. The fact was on the outside, the particular name was within. It got to the point immediately. As fixed and universal as the skull and crossbones on a bottle of poison, the black frame precluded any mush-mouthed circumlocution. Nobody had “passed away,” or “departed,” or been “called … Read more

Let me start out by taking questions from the audience. Yes, it’s been hand-tinted, which is to say painted, with water colors in this case. Because while color photographs existed and were highly desirable, they were new then and rather expensive. I’m guessing late 1940s, maybe early ’50s. Very odd, as if she were visiting … Read more