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" I was introduced to the work of Trent Parke (born in Australia in 1971, a member of Magnum since 2007) by a mutual friend, the photographer, Matt Stuart. He showed me two books by Parke, both self-published. The first was The Seventh Wave (2000), photographs of Australia's beaches, by Parke and his partner - now wife - Narelle Autio. A more intimate and egalitarian collaboration is hard to imagine. Without the list at the end explaining which pictures are by whom it would be impossible to tell them apart. Much of the action takes place in or under the waves. You don't look at this book. You open it and plunge in. Whoomp! Immediately, you're immersed, submerged. They're like pictures of being born, of people exploding into life beneath the sea, or bursting through the surface and into being. It's as if evolution has been speeded up and compressed so that the origins of life on the planet turn, in a split-second, to the creation of an individual human life. In the same breath it's mythic and candid - street photography from Atlantis! In one photograph we get a blurry echo of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam from the Sistine Chapel. Here it's two hands almost touching underwater, one clutching a ball of burning light. In a related picture - included in the Minutes to Midnight series - we see the birth of the photographers' own son, erupting from the water, dragging the umbilical cord like a lifesaver."

Dorothea Lange: The Photographer As Agricultural Sociologist By Linda Gordon To a startling degree, popular understanding of the Great Depression of the 1930s derives from visual images, and among them, Dorothea Lange's are the most influential. Although many do not know her name, her photographs live in the subconscious of virtually anyone in the United States who has any concept of that economic disaster. Her pictures exerted great force in their own time, helping shape 1930s and 1940s Popular Front representational and artistic sensibility, because the Farm Security Administration (FSA), her employer, distributed the photographs aggressively through the mass media. If you watch the film The Grapes of Wrath with a collection of her photographs next to you, you will see the influence.1 Lange's commitment to making her photography speak to matters of injustice was hardly unique-thousands of artists, writers, dancers, and actors were trying to connect with the vibrant grass-roots social movements of the time. They formed a cultural wing of the Popular Front, a politics of liberal-Left unity in support of the New Deal.

THEORY - "Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age" Image and Artifact: The Photograph as Evidence in the Digital Age By Martha A. Sandweiss The brief essays in this round table collectively explore how photographs can be used to understand the past. Their broad mix of voices-from the archivist and the historian, the photographer and the photographic subject-makes it clear that there is no one way to understand an image. Even a quick reading reveals interpretive tensions: the photographers' intentions clash with the ambitions of the subjects, and both appear at odds with the needs of the viewers, who bring to the image their own experiences and interpretive concerns. Despite their differences, the essays taken together pose two critical questions. What does a historian need to know to interpret a photograph as a historical document? And how stable are images as records of the past?

By A. D. Coleman The "New Documents" exhibition opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art on February 28, 1967, almost exactly a third of a century ago. Organized by John Szarkowski for the museum's Department of Photography, this show featured almost 100 prints by three relatively unrecognized younger photographers from the east coast of the U.S. - Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand - and came as a watershed moment in the evolution of contemporary photography. What exactly did this exhibition signify?

"Manufactured Landscapes": An Interview with Ed Burtynsky John K. Grande : What made you decide to start your photo lab, Toronto Image Works? Ed Burtynsky : When I graduated from Ryerson Polytechnic, there was no access to professional darkrooms in Toronto. After four years of working at home in the basement, I realized how inefficient my production was, and how impossible it became to realize the quality and scale of prints I envisioned. That was the original inspiration for Toronto Image Works. I decided not only to create something that would support my own creative printmaking, but also to open a facility for other artists in the city to use. J.K.G. : One often hears of an artist dealing with the sacred earth as a subject, and though that is fine, this brand of art can be diminished by its avoidance of world problems caused by production, pollution, toxic earth, global warming. Artists cannot whitewash what is something very real with purist aesthetics, no matter how beautiful, or ritual, or superficially sacred they may be. Your photos touch on that strange duality, for they attract us with beauty.

The photograph, framed without margins and behind Plexiglas, is just under four and a half feet high by nearly nine and a half feet wide. Its title is A Lunch at the Belvedere, and it depicts an actual event that took place at the Hotel Belvedere in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum of 2004. The lunch was hosted by Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, whose guest of honor was the famous American financier-philanthropist George Soros. The diners, eleven men, sit facing the viewer--though none looks toward the camera--on the far side of a long table that runs the full width of the picture. (To take this in the viewer must begin his or her engagement with the work by standing ten or twelve feet back from it.) One has the impression that the lunch has not properly begun. For the most part the men are talking quietly with one another, and to the left a chic young woman, possibly a waitress, bends over the table as if serving or taking an order. The image is by far most arresting toward its center, where the elegant, dark-haired and mustached Musharraf is shown talking earnestly to Soros, while a third man, to Soros's left, listens in. And what is arresting is precisely the extraordinary accuracy, as it seems to one, of the depiction of an entire range of small-scale, unemphatic, but nevertheless intensely photogenic gestures, expressions, postures, and pieces of behavior: for example, the small-scale gesture--scarcely more than a tensing of the wrist--of Musharraf's partly open left hand as he makes his point; the downward cast of Soros's head and his inscrutable, almost sullen-seeming facial expression as he plays with something on the tablecloth with his left hand; and the diffident demeanor of the third man who sits with both elbows on the table and his hands clasped.

Over the past 20 years, photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank has been something of a recluse, a sort of art-world J.D. Salinger, avoiding the public and generally declining requests for interviews. Dividing his time between his old loft on Bleecker Street in Manhattan and a former fisherman's shack on the coast of Nova Scotia, Frank has deliberately eschewed the trappings of celebrity in recent years despite growing acclaim for his work as a photographer--or perhaps because of it. In 1989 he became so fed up with the commercialization of the photography market that he nailed a stack of his rare vintage photographs to a board, tied it up with baling wire, and called that his art work. Such acts of defiance have only added to the legend of Frank's irascibility and desire to be left alone.

THEORY - "Boris Mikhailov: A Terrible Beauty" A Terrible Beauty by Sue Hubbard Boris Mikhailov: Case History The Saatchi Gallery 13th September- 25th November Boris Mikhailov is sixty-three, has dyed black hair, a white moustache and a young wife. Born in Kharkov in the Ukraine, he has recently exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery, just been awarded the Citibank Photography Prize and is now showing his work, Case History, which consists of over 400 photographs taken in the Ukraine, at The Saatchi Gallery. For anyone with a taste in postmodern irony, there is plenty to be found here. For Mikhailov takes pictures of the bomzhes, the homeless down and outs, victims of the economic and social collapse in the former USSR. But Boris Mikhailov is no Bill Brandt or Don McCullen capturing life's gritty realities with a clear humanist agenda, nor is he an objective eye simply documenting what he sees from behind his lens. Rather he is a director, a creator of mise en scènes, who seeks out the alcoholic, the drug addict, the ill and the dispossessed and then pays them not only to pose for him, but to expose themselves - genitals, scars, menstrual blood and hernias - to his scrutinizing gaze. This is the ultimate market exchange, the sale, for a few kopeks, of these peoples' only resource, their bodies. Like all capitalists and entrepreneurs they sell what they have for the best offer, in this case to a photographer who takes their pictures, which will then be consumed by the international art world. The irony is brought full circle, in a game of signifiers and signs, by the fact that it is Saatchi, the advertising guru who gave us 18 years of Thatcherism, who is playing host to these photos of some of the world's most abject. What, I kept wondering, would these subjects make of the private view, where the likes of Tracy Emin quaff champagne in her latest Agnès B, surrounded by their exposed and blistered penises, black eyes and filthy bodies; and what does it

THEORY - "Boris Mikhailov: A New Metaphysician" Boris Mikhailov: A New Metaphysician By Helen Petrovsky (Ithaca, New York) If we were to define photography today, we would have to posit its essential anonymity. To be more precise, we would have to rethink the very conditions of its theorizing: it is no longer "my" photograph that has to be redeemed by being set against the flow of time or the grand narratives of history. (And such, we remember, was Roland Barthes's project.) It is "nobody's" or, better still, "whatever" photograph that is likely to take its place in theorizing.

THEORY - "An Interview with Garry Winogrand" From Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography, Interviews with photographers by Barbara Diamonstein, 1981-1982, Rizoli: New York Garry Winogrand is one of the most important photographers at work in America today. His sophisticated snapshot-aesthetic pictures celebrate ordinary events, and transform them with precise timing and framing into astute visual commentaries on modern life.

THEORY - " Robert Frank: Dissecting the American Image" Robert Frank: Dissecting the American Image By Jno Cook for Exposure Eagazine, Volume 24, Number 1, Spring 1986 What a poem this is, what poems can be written about this book of pictures some day... -- Jack Kerouac When I first saw Frank's photographs in The Americans [1] I understood nothing of them -- yet they demanded comprehension. I later realized that even when exhibited singly in museums, they still evoked their placement in the book -- like quotations from a sacred text they called up entire passages, themes, subtle connections to other photographs. Here started a journey into The Americans in an attempt to understand not just the photographs, but the book. It has been a journey among museum archives, borrowed books, and xerox machines. It has meant searching out other Frank fanatics, engaging in endless and at times pointless discussions and arguments, and planning forays into literature and foreign languages.

THEORY: "The ethics of seeing: Susan Sontag and visual culture studies" The ethics of seeing: Susan Sontag and visual culture studies By Marc Furstenau There are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. --Susan Sontag

THEORY - "Interview with Walker Evans" Interview with Walker Evans Conducted by Paul Cummings In Connecticut October 13, 1971 In New York City December 23, 1971 The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Walker Evans conducted by Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The interview took place at the home of Walker Evans in Connecticut on October 13, 1971 and in his apartment in New York City on December 23, 1971.

By Bruno Chalifour "I would like to see everything, to look at everything." (1) These are Josef Koudelka's words quoted by Robert Delpire, his friend, editor and curator. "My photographs, you know them. You have published them, you have exhibited them, then you can tell whether they mean something or not." (2) The fact is Robert Delpire is far from being a novice in the world of photography. Unbeknownst to many, he was the first publisher of Robert Frank's The Americans in 1958, a year before Grove Press in the U.S., and the first director of the Centre National de la Photographie in Paris.

THEORY: "Lee Friedlander: Museum of Modern Art, New York" Lee Friedlander: Museum of Modern Art, New York ArtForum, Sept, 2005 by Carol Armstrong Walking with a friend through the Lee Friedlander retrospective at MOMA, I noticed that the two of us each had a different way of looking at almost every early street photograph on view: One of us saw the photograph a certain way right off the bat and couldn't easily see it otherwise, while the other noticed everything else in the photo and could only see the "hook" after having it pointed out. What in one viewing looked like Americanized pieces of Cartier-Bresson poetic doubling in another couldn't be disentangled from a set of densely stratified spatial and perceptual conundrums that at once posit the transparency of photography and question it at every level.

THEORY - "Andreas Gursky and The Contemporary Sublime" Andreas Gursky and The Contemporary Sublime Art Journal, Winter, 2002 by Alix Ohlin The German photographer Andreas Gursky takes pictures of enormous spaces--stock exchanges, skyscrapers, mountain peaks--in which crowds of people look tiny and relentless, making their presence felt in the world, like a minute, leisurely colony of ants. Also like ants, these people appear to spend little time examining their own encroachment--architectural, technological, and personal--on the natural world. In their determined, oblivious way, the people in his photographs make clear that there is no longer any nature uncharted by man. In place of nature we find the invasive landmarks of a global economy Taken as a whole, Gursky's work constitutes a map of the postmodern civilized world.

THEORY - "The Treacherous Medium: Why Photography Critics Hate Photographs " The Treacherous Medium: Why photography critics hate photographs Boston Review, by Susie Linfield In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a little essay called "What is the Good of Criticism?" This is a question that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that some have answered with hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn't think that criticism would save the world, but he didn't think it was a worthless pursuit, either. For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism, Baudelaire wrote, "passion … raises reason to new heights." A few years later, he would explain that through criticism he sought "to transform my pleasure into knowledge"-a pithy, excellent description of critical practice. Baudelaire's American contemporary Margaret Fuller held a similar view; as she put it, the critic teaches us "to love wisely what we before loved well."

THEORY - "Walker Evans and American Life" Scavenging the Landscape: Walker Evans and American life Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1996 by Melissa Rachleff The Great American Depression, spanning the 1930s, inscribed into the culture a psychic crisis. Faith in industrial ingenuity, heralded as "progressive," came unhinged. By 1933, four years after the stock market crash, one quarter of the work force was unemployed.(1) Into this dilemma came a multitude of photographic projects, the most famous of which were sponsored by the federal government in the form of agencies that provided relief to farmers, the unemployed and others. The most completely realized project was the documentation of conditions faced by displaced farmers, recorded by the Historic Section of the Resettlement Administration (RA), later the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The socially-oriented photographic book made its appearance, as did the photographic magazine, best exemplified by Life in 1936. Many of the best known American photographers came to prominence during the Depression, including Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and Margaret Bourke-White. Of all the photographers from that era, one represented the quintessential photographic style of the Depression while remaining an elusive figure in photographic history: Walker Evans (1903-1975).

William Eggleston: The Tender-Cruel Camera by Thomas Weski 'I don't particularly like what's around me.' I said that could be a good reason to take pictures. He said: 'You know, that's not a bad idea.' Around the middle of the sixties, in the middle of the night, William Eggleston was standing in one of the first industrial photofinishing laboraties, watching hundreds of color photos being churned out of the developing machines on endless reels of paper. Countless such visits were to sharpen Eggleston's awareness of the world of images and its amateurish, unpretentious treatment by the masses of people who had their color snaps developed and printed in this laboratory overnight. For Eggleston, this confrontation with visual mediocrity was an altogether exciting and unforgettable experience and was to become an important basis for his later work.

INTERVIEW - "Interview with Gilles Peress: Images, Reality and the Curse of History"