essay

The Kept and the Killed By Erica Eisen Of the 270,000 photographs commissioned by the US Farm Security Administration to document the Great Depression, more than a third were “killed”. Erica X Eisen examines the history behind this hole-punched archive and the unknowable void at its center...

Scenes of Reading on the Early Portrait Postcard By Melina Moe and Victoria Nebolsin When picture postcards began circulating with a frenzy across the United States and Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, a certain motif proved popular: photographs of people posed with books. Melina...

Tourists in our own reality: Susan Sontag’s Photography at 50 by: Andrew Milne This year marks 50 years since Susan Sontag’s essay Photography was published in the New York Review of Books. Slightly edited and renamed In Plato’s Cave, it would become the first essay in her collection On...