As a child, Joshua Lutz watched his mother search for patterns in license-plate numbers. At night, she would unscrew the phone looking for hidden recording bugs. Lutz’s book “Hesitating Beauty” is a meditation on his relationship to his mother’s mental illness, told through the reworking of archived family images, imagined correspondences, and his own photographs. 

Here, Lutz writes about his experience, plus a slideshow of photos from his book: http://nyr.kr/XWWxhg 

(Source: newyorker.com)

On Election Day, we asked New Yorker readers to take a photograph of their voting experience and post it to our Google+ page. Click-through for a slideshow featuring a few of our favorites. 

In 1938 or ’39, a boy of five or six, or maybe seven, was so enthralled by the beauty of a postcard of the Empire State Building that he took his entire five-cent allowance and bought five of them—all exactly the same image. “I can see that postcard today,” Leonard Lauder said of the purchase that turned him into a collector for life. And though he is known widely for his unsurpassed cache of Cubist art and his many gifts of blue-chip American art to the Whitney Museum, Lauder has maintained an obsession with micro-pictures all his life. He owns about a hundred and twenty-five thousand postcards—at the moment.

Judith H. Dobrzynski looks at Leonard Lauder’s postcards (“miniature masterpieces”), currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. See more on Lauder, plus a slideshow.

“Attachments,” a group photography show featured in this week’s Goings On About Town section, opened this Saturday at The Hole. Curated by Kathy Grayson and Tim Barber, the show features work by nine contemporary photographers: Barber, Andrew Kuo, Asger Carlsen, Jason Nocito, Jessica Eaton, Jim Mangan, Kate Steciw, Peter Sutherland, and Sandy Kim.

Click-through for a slideshow of images, and more from Jessie Wender on the show: http://nyr.kr/VkmnuQ

(Source: newyorker.com)

This week in the magazine, Peter Schjeldahl reviews “Ai Weiwei: According to What?” at the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, D.C. The show is a retrospective of work by the Chinese artist and activist, ranging from video installations to enormous sculptures. “Ai broadcasts the jolting, even triumphalist, dynamism of a booming Chinese art world, on a grand scale,” Schjeldahl writes.

In this audio slide show, Schjeldahl describes Ai’s work as a test of his personal freedoms under the repressive Chinese government. “Ai is revealing where the lines are because he keeps crossing them,” Schjeldahl says. “Is Ai Weiwei a political artist, or an artful politician?”

In his article “Prying Eyes,” in this week’s issue, Jonah Weiner writes about the artist Trevor Paglen, who uses specialized equipment to document sites of secret government activity.  

Click-through for a selection of photographs from Paglen’s various bodies of work, with descriptions by Weiner: http://nyr.kr/QqecNv

“I don’t look for these notes,” the Japanese-born, New York-based photographer Hiroyuki Ito told me. “Rather they find me.”

In his forays throughout the city, Ito is constantly on the lookout for those quiet, yet quintessentially New York images—serendipitous, a bit dark, and suggestive of secrets. Among his findings has been this series of notes, photographed as he found them. “They don’t mean much to me, since none of them were addressed to me,” he said, but still, “they tickle my imagination.” This is in part, he explains, because there is no guarantee that they were not intended for him. “The city is full of people whose potentials are never fully articulated and soon to be forgotten.”

Click-through to see a slideshow of Ito’s photographs.

Could this year’s Presidential debates possibly be as funny as a New Yorker debate cartoon? Click-through to see the cartoon slide show, watch the debates, and judge by your own laughter: http://nyr.kr/VhmoUR

And be sure to join New Yorker writers and editors for our debate live chat.

In November, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will unveil an exhibition on war photography unprecedented in scale and ambition. The origins of “War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath” can be traced back to the museum’s acquisition—ten years ago—of the first known print of Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of the raising of the American flag at Iwo Jima.

Click-through for a slideshow (on our revamped Photo Booth blog) of images, and more from Elissa Curtis on the exhibit: http://nyr.kr/R5kzn8

(Source: newyorker.com)

The photographer Platon is known for his portraits of powerful leaders such as Vladimir Putin and world-changing figures such as the Little Rock Nine. But it was a much more personal project that brought us into his studio earlier this summer, where he showed us a body of work he’d created over the past twenty years during trips to his childhood home in the Greek Islands.

As part of the celebration of Photo Booth’s redesign this week, here is the first installment of a new video series of studio visits with photographers: a behind-the-scenes look at Platon’s “Greece,” which will be exhibited for the first time at Colette, in Paris, this November.

Click-through for a slideshow of Platon’s “Greece,” and more from Maria Lokke and Photo Booth: http://nyr.kr/ROmFr7