A collection of fascinating articles on photography

There’s an inherent mystery to the art of photography. We often think of artists as controlling their materials directly: using their hands, they shape stone, trace ink, or apply paint. But photographers seem to work in a more oblique and indirect way, by capturing, staging, or framing reality. In the best photographs, real life merges with the world of art.

How is that magic accomplished? This week, we take you behind the lens with a collection of pieces about the art and craft of photography. There are profiles of Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Cindy Sherman, and Edward Steichen. Susan Sontag writes on how photography shapes our view of war; Janet Malcolm explores the question of how “realistic” a photograph can (or should) be. We hope you enjoy these glimpses of the photographer’s quest to, as Malcolm puts it, uncover a “work of art in the mess and flux of life.”

—Erin Overbey and Joshua Rothman, archivists

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Saul Leiter in Black and White by Genevieve Fussell

Photo © Saul Leiter

“MacArthur Parade, c. 1951”

Saul Leiter lived in an apartment on a quiet street in New York’s East Village, a neighborhood that evolved, during the six decades he lived there, nearly as much as Leiter himself. An undervalued photographer for most of his life, Leiter quietly amassed a body of work that has only recently begun receiving the credit it deserves. Since his death, last fall, the apartment has become Leiter’s de facto archive; Margit Erb, his gallery representative, and Anders Goldfarb, his long-time assistant, have spent months organizing the boxes of prints, negatives, portfolios, and books that he left haphazardly piled throughout the space.

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