Tag: photography

Screening Room: 2025 Sundance Film Festival

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - FestivalsLeave a comment

This year’s Sundance Film Festival just concluded. Your fearless correspondent delivered a roundup of the tensions roiling the festival at the moment, not to mention the films worth seeking out and the ones best avoided. That is available for your reading pleasure at PopMatters:

There seemed to be two questions on everyone’s mind at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The first was the same as ever at this festival or any other: “What have you seen?” This question is often academic because there aren’t many available tickets left to get by the time it’s asked – usually by a stranger in line for another film…

I also contributed some full-length reviews to Slant Magazine:

Reader’s Corner: ‘American Gothic’

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

I wrote about the exhibition and book “American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson” for Rain Taxi Review of Books:

Like many great collaborations, the iconic partnership of Gordon Parks and Ella Watson was an accident. In 1942, only a couple of years after the Kansas-born and Minnesota-seasoned Parks had left the Twin Cities, he started a photography fellowship with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C. In his autobiography A Choice of Weapons, Parks described talking to FSA head Roy Stryker about the challenges of “using my camera effectively against intolerance.” Stryker, whose agency was tasked with fighting poverty and had already hired the likes of Walter Evans and Dorothea Lange to visualize the devastation wrought by the Great Depression, had some advice for Parks: Pointing to a Black “charwoman” mopping the hallway, Stryker said, “See what she has to say about life and things. You might find her interesting.” Parks spent four months with Watson at her work and home. The result is one of the most visually striking and quietly charged photo series of the twentieth century…

Screening Room: ‘A Choice of Weapons’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

In John Maggio’s documentary A Choice of Weapons, the photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks dazzles not only as a groundbreaking artist but as a continuing inspiration to younger photojournalists.

A Choice of Weapons played at the Tribeca Festival and is coming to HBO later this year. My review is at Slant:

Born in 1912 and raised on a Kansas farm, Parks lived by his wits and talents (which included playing piano in a Minneapolis brothel) before finding photography. A stint at the Farm Security Administration in 1942 resulted almost accidentally in a stark, Dorothea Lange-esque series about black cleaning woman Ella Watson. One of the portraits, American Gothic, Washington, D.C., which showed her standing dourly in front of an American flag inside the FSA, was considered so politically incendiary that it almost got Parks fired…

Nota Bene: Afrofuturism in Chicago

On By chrisbarsantiIn OmniculturalLeave a comment

There’s an exhibition right now at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago called “In Their Own Form.” According to the museum, it explores “the myriad ways blackness might hope to exist without the imposition of oppression, racism and stereotypes ever-present in Western cultures, mediated through Afrofuturist themes including time-travel and escapism.”

The Guardian had a simpler take, titling its piece “Before Black Panther“:

The goal of the show, says curator Sheridan Tucker, is to show a wide range of the Afro-diasporic experience through photography and video. “I wanted to show escapism, nostalgia and time travel, recurring themes in afrofuturism,” said Tucker. “I’m excited people can tap into what I’ve been talking about for a long time.”

Writer’s Corner: Finding Beauty

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Omnicultural, WritingLeave a comment

Cunningham_facades_coverBill Cunningham, the legendarily sharp-eyed and self-effacing fashion photographer for Details and later the New York Times, died a couple weeks ago at the age of 87. His was an extraordinary life and worth checking up on (particularly this fantastic documentary), even if fashion and photography aren’t your thing.

He had a lot of things to say about art, creativity, and finding your way in the world as somebody who cares passionately about those things and wants to pursue them with dignity.

Take, for instance, this:

It is as true today as it ever was. He who seeks beauty shall find it.

Think of that the next time you’re writing, regardless of whether you’re trying to create something beautiful, raw, ugly, or simply honest. Go looking for what you want to say and you will figure out how to say it.

New in Theaters: ‘The Salt of the Earth’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

One of Sebastio Salgado's iconic photographs in 'The Salt of the Earth' (Sony Pictures Classics)
One of Sebastio Salgado’s iconic photographs in ‘The Salt of the Earth’ (Sony Pictures Classics)

Given a brief Academy Awards run late last year, Wim Wenders’ magisterial documentary about photographer Sebastio Salgado is finally getting a proper theatrical release this week.

My review is at Film Journal International:

“A photographer,” Wim Wenders intones at the start of his elegantly respectful documentary on Sebastião Salgado, “is literally somebody painting with light.” This definition sounds grand, to be sure. But the act of creation that Wenders captures here doesn’t quite seem to resemble painting. Salgado’s work is in some ways the definition of high-concept photography. His rich, lusciously layered, black-and-white shots of teeming gold mine workers, refugees streaming across a desert, or a line of penguins flinging themselves off a glacier are so elegantly composed as to almost defy reality…

Here’s the trailer: