Click-through to read Emily Greenhouse on the 850th anniversary celebration of Notre Dame Cathedral, plus a vintage slideshow: http://nyr.kr/Teof9x

(Source: newyorker.com)

Henri Cartier-Bresson travelled the world for four decades, both documenting and participating in the art, political, and social movements that would move twentieth-century culture from the old to the modern world. Originally a student of Surrealist painting, Cartier-Bresson was advised by Gertrude Stein, after she saw one of his paintings, that he’d be better off joining his family’s textile business. Instead he committed to photography, and a new type of fast portable camera: the Leica. He eventually become one of the first photographers to join the famed photo cooperative Magnum. “Joining Magnum didn’t mean leaving a coherent artistic sphere for an alien job; and being a photo-journalist didn’t mean being a photographer,” the late scholar and photo-curator Peter Galassi writes. “It meant being a student, a diplomat, a traveler, an investigator, a reporter, a historian. To Cartier-Bresson it meant engaging the whole of the world.” Today, in honor of Cartier-Bresson’s birthday, we take a look at some of the more celebratory photographs from his extraordinary career. 

Click-through for a slideshow of Cartier-Bresson’s work: http://nyr.kr/R0WkpT

(Source: newyorker.com)

Gil Blank photographs fireworks at municipal displays, where he “can record single bursts being detonated at a time.” He then isolates the explosion, replaces the night sky with a flat black background, and surrounds the image with a wide white border, “like a specimen on a slide.” Sometimes he combines bursts from different places and different nights into a single image. “The images are perfectly factual—the explosions did in fact happen—but not necessarily the way you see them,” he writes. “The compounding and suturing process of which is, in any event, much more akin to memory anyway. You weren’t there—you didn’t see these particular fireworks—but none of that matters, because the subject is still immediately identifiable in that generically yearning way as a plausible placeholder for those non-existent memories.” Blank’s work is currently included in a group exhibition Endless Bummer / Surf Elsewhere at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles.

In the spirit of Independence Day, click-through for a selection of contemporary images inspired by Fourth of July festivities: http://nyr.kr/c3pGBN

Happy Independence Day! In honor of the holiday and the celebratory barbecues it often invites, here’s a look back at Calvin Trillin’s 2008 piece on then-ranked best Texas BBQ in the world: http://nyr.kr/mGsC

In discussions of Texas barbecue, the equivalent of Matt Damon and George Clooney and Brad Pitt would be establishments like Kreuz Market and Smitty’s Market, in Lockhart; City Market, in Luling; and Louie Mueller Barbecue, in Taylor—places that reflect the barbecue tradition that developed during the nineteenth century out of German and Czech meat markets in the Hill Country of central Texas. (In fact, the title of Texas Monthly’s first article on barbecue—it was published in 1973, shortly after the magazine’s founding—was “The World’s Best Barbecue Is in Taylor, Texas. Or Is It Lockhart?”) Those restaurants, all of which had been in the top tier in 2003, were indeed there again in this summer’s survey. For the first time, though, a No. 1 had been named, and it was not one of the old familiars. “The best barbecue in Texas,” the article said, “is currently being served at Snow’s BBQ, in Lexington.”

A 1960 Arthur Getz cover.

This Sunday, as every fourth Sunday in June, the streets of New York will fill with prideful marchers celebrating Pride Month. There will be similar marches, too, in cities around the country. Sunday marks the forty-third year since the uprising in a Greenwich Village bar called Stonewall that supposedly started the modern gay revolution. The myth is that a few hundred angry people acted out in lower Manhattan, and the world changed. Maybe that’s where Occupy Wall Street got the idea that this is how it’s done. 

It’s the wrong lesson… Their achievement is a field guide to how to make a social movement, and also offers insight into why Occupy is failing.

What Stonewall got right, and Occupy got wrong: http://nyr.kr/L8gITl

James Wood found himself “left cold by all the excitement around Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee,” but one activity did warm his spirit: http://nyr.kr/Kyi5AI

John Cassidy on the extravagance of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations in London: http://nyr.kr/LvTGY2

Going to the Queen’s party: scenes from the Diamond Jubilee in London http://nyr.kr/Lr19b3

Cartoon of the day. Don’t forget to enter this week’s caption contest: http://nyr.kr/r46had

For more football coverage, read Reeves Wideman’s piece on Tim Tebow and divine mystery over on our Sporting Scene blog: http://nyr.kr/s0Jn6v