“Photography” Articles

I was briefly in Santa Fe, New Mexico last month, where a good friend insisted we pay a visit to the Monroe Gallery of Photography. The storefront space displays images from a century of photojournalism: iconic pictures from the US civil rights era, quirky takes on famous writers, moody landscapes, and candid moments in the lives of ordinary people. Among the more recent images was a 2020 color photo of a nineteen-year-old native of Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo dancing on a stone platform.

I first became aware of the photographs of Deana Lawson because of a piece that Zadie Smith wrote about Lawson in The New Yorker a few years ago and I remember it being quite a good piece, which is not unusual for a piece by Zadie Smith and, to be completely truthful, I find that I am often much more moved and impressed when Zadie Smith writes about visual art than I am by the novels of Zadie Smith.