Photography
The truth about food photography
While looking at the photographs of food in this humorous exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, I thought of how hopelessly…
Sebastiao Salgado – master of monochrome, chronicler of the depths of human barbarity
Occasionally, we encounter an image that seems so ludicrously out of kilter with the modern world that we can only…
Cindy Sherman – selfie queen
The selfie is, of course, a major, and to me mysterious, phenomenon of our age. The sheer indefatigability of selfie-takers,…
Geoff Dyer on the poetry of motels
It’s to be expected. You take photographs in order to document things — Paris in the case of Eugène Atget…
From haunted to haunter: the afterlife of W.G. Sebald
East Anglia, the rump of the British Isles, has inspired a disproportionate number of writers: Robert Macfarlane, Daisy Johnson, Mark…
Few soldiers have seen as many terrible sights as Don McCullin
Diane Arbus saw mid-20th century New York as if she was in a waking dream. Or at least that is…
A short history of ice skating
In landscape terms, the Fens don’t have much going for them. What you can say for them, though, is that…
![Twiggy photographed by Justin de Villeneuve in the Rainbow Room at Big Biba, early 1970s. [JUSTIN DE VILLENEUVE]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/USE_JDV_TW046.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
A short history of art deco – from high art to two-tone shoes, garden gates to Twiggy
On 10 September 1973 the 1930s Kensington High Street department store formerly known as Derry & Toms reopened as Big…
The artist who breathes Technicolour life into historic photographs
There is something of The Wizard of Oz about Marina Amaral’s photographs. She whisks us from black-and-white Kansas to shimmering…
How the world was turned upside down by revelation of aerial perspectives
‘To look at ourselves from afar,’ Julian Barnes wrote in Levels of Life, ‘to make the subjective suddenly objective: this…
Gursky’s subject is humanity: prosaic, mundane, extremely messy His colossal, panoramic pictures are brilliant and lowering at the same time
Walking around the Andreas Gursky exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, I struggled to recall what these huge photographs reminded me…
What makes a semi-police state happy?
This charming collection of individual photographic portraits of Bhutanese citizens intentionally highlights the two central features of the kingdom today:…
True, dogged likenesses
There are currently 151,000,000 photos on Instagram tagged #Dog which is 14,000,000 more than those tagged #Cat. The enormous number…
A love letter to Turkey’s lost past
Patricia Daunt’s collection of essays is a fascinating exploration of some of Turkey’s most beautiful and evocative places, from the…
Sex and the city: the best art books of the year
‘I should like,’ Edgar Degas once remarked, ‘to be famous and unknown.’ On the whole, he managed to achieve this.…
A short history of flash photography
All photography requires light, but the light used in flash photography is unique — shocking, intrusive and abrupt. It’s quite…
People and place: an outstanding archive of rural Britain
In 1970 I wandered around an unfamiliar part of West Devon. Down a grassy lane I came across a farmyard…
Nothing is quite what it seems
One day, somebody will stage an exhibition of artists taught at the Slade by the formidable Henry Tonks, who considered…
The first celebrity
It’s quite a scene to imagine. A maniacal self-publicist with absurd facial hair takes off in what’s thought to be…
Repo women
Aren’t you getting a little sick of the white cube? I am. I realised how sick last week after blundering…
The great pretenders
Can the beauty of Palmyra be reproduced by data-driven robots? Stephen Bayley on copies, fakes and forgeries
Is it art or science?
William Henry Fox Talbot had many accomplishments. He was Liberal MP for Chippenham; at Cambridge he won a prize for…
Diary
Killing time in a Heathrow first-class lounge, I notice how many men adopt an unmistakable ‘first-class lounge’ persona. They stand…
The counterfeiters
One day, in the autumn of 1960, a young Frenchman launched himself off a garden wall in a suburban street…
You’ve been framed
The photographer Martin Parr claims to like ordinary people, but are his pictures celebratory or mocking, asks Stephen Bayley
