Photography
How cartomania captivated even Queen Victoria
The craze for photographic cartes de visite that swept Victorian Britain was further boosted by the Queen’s own enthusiasm for the format
John Deakin: the perfect anti-hero of the tawdry Soho scene
The photographer never attempted to show anyone in a good light, making his portraits of Francis Bacon and other Soho habitués look like dress rehearsals for morgue shots
The quiet brilliance of street photographer Saul Leiter
This is the second exhibition of mid-century New York street photography at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. The first,…
No one should trust the camera in the age of AI
Bryan Appleyard on photographic manipulation, past and present
The stuff of nightmares: Retrievals podcast reviewed
It is the stuff of nightmares, or a queasily dystopian film plot. A woman is undergoing a surgical procedure in…
Huge, impersonal canvases designed for the walls of billionaires: Tate Modern’s Capturing the Moment reviewed
‘Photography has arrived at a point where it is capable of liberating painting from all literature, from the anecdote, and…
Barbara Ker-Seymer – Bright Young Person in the shadows
Though she photographed many society figures of the 1930s, Ker-Seymer lacked ambition and remains largely unknown – as she herself seems to have wanted
The woman who pioneered colour photography
Hermione Eyre on Yevonde, the pioneering 1930s photographer whose colour portraits evoke a vanishing world
When Lee Miller met Picasso
During the liberation of Paris in August 1944, the photographer Lee Miller made her way to Picasso’s studio on rue…
Promethean grandeur: Maurice Broomfield – Industrial Sublime, at the V&A, reviewed
When Maurice Broomfield left school at the age of 15, he took a job at the Rolls-Royce factory, bending copper…
The beauty of gasholders
Dan Hitchens on the beauty of gasholders
Was Thomas Edison guilty of murder?
In September 1890 a Frenchman called Louis Le Prince left his brother in Dijon and boarded a train to Paris,…
Valuable reassessment of British art: Barbican's Postwar Modern reviewed
Notoriously, the past is another country: what’s more, it’s a terrain for which the guidebooks need constantly to be rewritten.…
Meet climber, photographer and filmmaker extraordinaire Jimmy Chin
Jimmy Chin is part Bear Grylls, part David Attenborough: he both climbs snow, ice and rock and films other mountaineers doing it too, writes Theo Zenou
The art of seizing the moment in photographic portraiture
A Tatler photographer once told me that the secret to taking a good photo was the three Ts: tum, tits,…
Fortifying snapshot of the gardener’s year: Saatchi Gallery's RHS Botanical Art show reviewed
Elizabeth Blackadder, who died last month at the age of 89, was probably the most distinctive botanical artist of our…
Hugely pleasurable – a vision of summer: Jennifer Packer at the Serpentine Gallery reviewed
We need to talk about Eric. In Jennifer Packer’s portrait of her friend and fellow artist, Eric N. Mack sits…
A high-end car-boot sale of the unconscious: Colnaghi’s Dreamsongs reviewed
In 1772 the 15-year-old Mozart wrote a one-act opera set, like The Magic Flute, in a dream world. Il sogno…
William Boyd on the miraculous snaps of boy genius Jacques Henri Lartigue
William Boyd on the miraculous snaps of boy genius Jacques Henri Lartigue
Mother nature is finally getting the art she deserves
Exhibitions about fungi, bugs and trees illustrate the depth, range and vitality of a growing field of art, says Mark Cocker
The dark past of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge
A distinctive pattern of horizontal and vertical lines appears in the background of many of Eadweard Muybridge’s best-known photographs, giving…
Why David Suchet makes the perfect Poirot
I can imagine a quiz question along the lines of ‘What do Shylock, Lady Bracknell, Sigmund Freud and Hercule Poirot…
The truth about food photography
While looking at the photographs of food in this humorous exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery, I thought of how hopelessly…
Sebastiao Salgado – master of monochrome, chronicler of the depths of human barbarity
Occasionally, we encounter an image that seems so ludicrously out of kilter with the modern world that we can only…
Cindy Sherman – selfie queen
The selfie is, of course, a major, and to me mysterious, phenomenon of our age. The sheer indefatigability of selfie-takers,…
