FEATURING:

The Mushroom Collector, Jason Fulford, discusses his obsessive and genre-defying project.  (cover)

An interview with influential French publisher Robert Delpire about his formidable achievements over the last fifty years as a pioneer in photography magazine and book publishing, films, and advertising. Information on related exhibitions here.

Young South African photographer Daniel Naudé’s series Animal Farm that chronicles mankind’s dominion over animals.

Excerpts from Martin Parr’s new book, Up and Down Peachtree, a whimsical look at Atlanta, Georgia’s popular culture.

Award-winning photojournalist Stephanie Sinclair’s images documenting women’s issues from around the world.

Sylvia Plachy captures and notes fleeting moments at the Kentucky Derby and a nearby cemetery.

Best-selling author Francine Prose on Judy Linn, best known for her photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith.

Vintage Congolese nightlife photos by Jean Depara.

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How might the verbal atmosphere artists create around their work affect or complicate our understanding of it? Would our perception of Diane Arbus’ photographs change were we to hear what she had to say about them?

This Saturday, May 5, 2012 at 5:00pm, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival (now through May 6, 2012), MoMA is screening A Slide Show and Talk By Diane Arbus. The 40-minute film was compiled by Neil Selkirk, Doon Arbus, and Adam Shott from an original 1970 recording of a slide presentation given one year before the photographer’s death. It has been shown less than a dozen times publicly and offers us the rare opportunity to hear the photographer lecture on her images. Nearly 40 years after publication, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph which features 80 of those images, remains one of our most popular photobooks.

Following the screening, novelist and president of PEN American Center, Francine Prose along with Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Hours, Michael Cunningham, and Doon Arbus discuss how the photographer’s “precise use of language” illuminates her pictures. They will also read from the recently released book, Diane Arbus: A Chronology, which was primarily composed of exerpts from her letters, notebooks, writings, and journals. Through her own words, they explore the nature of her observation.

In the film, according to Yale Daily News, which reviewed a screening at Yale University Art Gallery last month, Arbus said on that topic: “I do it because I think there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.”

Screening:
Saturday, May 5, 2012
5:00–6:30 pm

Film ticket: $12, $10 seniors, $8 students. MoMA members free but a screening ticket is required. Tickets are released one week in advance starting at 9:30 am at MoMA’s main lobby information desk. Please view MoMA’s ticketing policy here.

Museum of Modern Art
Theater 1
11 West 53rd Street
New York, New York
(212) 708-9400

Read a profile of Mary Ellen Mark, one of the most influential women photographers of all time, and her ongoing Prom series in The Washington Post here. Mark uses a 20 x 24 Polaroid camera for this project.

The work and accompanying article by Francine Prose first appeared in Aperture magazine, issue 187.

Aperture Exclusive: Mark’s fourteenth publication, the bestselling Twins, with accompanying DVD by documentary filmmaker Martin Bell is available here as a set.