From biennials and installations to participatory practices, contemporary art has come to embrace an aesthetic of democratization. Art's capacity for democracy building now defines its contemporary relevance, part of a broader, global glorification of democracy as, it seems, the only legitimate mode[...]
Soon after Alexander Gardner's "Photographic Sketch Book" was published, in 1866, it became the Civil War's best-known visual record and helped define how viewers, then and in subsequent generations, would come to know the war. Gardner's classic also became foundational in the history of American ph[...]
The Story of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin. The enthralling true story of a family living in Stalin's Russia, seen though the eyes of a young boy growing up in a family of Kazakh nomads. The author describes scouring the fields with his mother for a few ears of corn, and journeying alone across frozen[...]