In the Picture by Lee Friedlander
Lee Friedlander's clever use of reflections and shadows plays a prominent part in this collection of self-portraits spanning half a centuryLee Friedlander first came to public attention in 1967 when his work appeared in the New Documents exhibition at ...
Claire de Rouen obituary
Claire de Rouen, the founder and proprietor of the independent fashion and photography bookshop of the same name, has died after a long illness. Claire was something of a Soho icon to fashion students and photography buffs, and her tiny shop on the fir...
Kelly Macdonald: ‘I’m so not a celebrity’
TV gangster drama Boardwalk Empire has finally made a star of Kelly Macdonald. As she prepares for a new series, the Scottish actress talks about working with Scorsese and why the whole celeb thing is 'a wee bit silly'Until recently, Kelly Macdonald w...
The Doors by Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus's essay on the Doors and their music is as passionate and rewarding as you might expect – if you can ride out the stormier flights of fancyFor me, the most succinct and illuminating portrait of the Doors is still Joan Didion's masterful ...
Photography books of the year 2011: a snapshot of Christmas gift ideas
From the Ruins of Detroit to the New York subway, via Elin Høyland's touching portrait of two brothers and Pieter Hugo's haunting images of Rwanda, Sean O'Hagan looks back at his favourite photobooks of 2011It's that time of the year again and, in no ...
Christian Patterson goes on the trail of America’s natural born killers
The Brooklyn photographer's latest book, Redheaded Peckerwood, is strange and beautiful despite its subject – an epic killing spree that has haunted America since 1958In January 1958, Charles Starkweather, a 20 year-old from Lincoln in Nebraska, and ...
Pieter Hugo photographs the lingering legacy of the Rwanda genocide
The still-visible aftermath of the 1994 atrocities forms the focus of one of Hugo's projects, in which he challenges the camera's power to portray things as they really areA few weeks ago, Pieter Hugo won the Seydo Keita award, the most prestigious pri...
The art of war photography
A pair of new photobooks explore soldiers' use of cameras in conflicts from the Vietnam war to the Northern Irish TroublesThere is a passage in Despatches, Michael Herr's viscerally powerful memoir of his time as a war correspondent in Vietnam in the l...
Koudelka Gypsies by Josef Koudelka and Will Guy – review
Josef Koudelka's photographs of Gypsies in the 1960s and 70s show nomadic life at its most romanticBetween 1962 and 1971, Josef Koudelka travelled throughout his native Czechoslovakia and beyond to rural Romania, Hungary, France and Spain. His main sub...
Lynne Ramsay: ‘Just talk to me straight’
The Scottish director is back with a highly acclaimed adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin. Turns out there's plenty she needs to talk about tooIn one of several disturbing scenes in Lynne Ramsay's new film, We Need to Talk About Kevin , Eva, the ...
Philosophers set in stone: Steve Pyke’s piercing portraits
For over 30 years he has photographed famous faces. Now Steve Pyke's second volume of portraits of the world's great thinkers lays bare his talent for mapping the human faceThe most difficult thing for me is a portrait. You have to try and put your cam...
Jerome Liebling obituary
Socially conscious US photographer who focused on 'the everyday, the ordinary'The American photographer Jerome Liebling, who has died aged 87, once said that his motivation was "to figure out where the pain was, and to show things that p...
