A couple of weeks ago, I stood before a crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau and listened to the tour guide talk about the sonderkommandos. The sonderkommandos, he explained quietly, were the prisoners tasked with removing dead corpses from the gas chambers – after the victims had been showered with cyanide and choked to death – and then…
When the international photographic agency Magnum Photos asked its members to select one of their works which they felt “changed everything,” the hope, according to Magnum’s website, was for the photographers to “reflect on their careers and identify a single picture that represents a turning point in their lives as image makers.” Among the 51…
It all started with my grandfather, Sidney Goldstein, and his Korean War memoir. I found it several years ago while helping clean out my grandparents’ garage. I was 26 when I read it for the first time, and he was 27 when he wrote the letters his memoir was based on. I knew he’d written…
Over the past three years, filmmaker Josh Seftel has filmed a murder, a suicide and a stroke. He has filmed obesity, loneliness, homelessness and alcoholism. And a sad birthday party or two. The subject of these scenes is always the same: photographer Philip Toledano, who plagued by fears of his own mortality, decided to create…
Where’s Kim? An ultra-Orthodox web site photoshopped out the image of the reality star eating dinner with her famous hubby Kanye West and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat Just about every part of Kim Kardashian has probably been exposed to the world by now, between her infamous sex tape, reality television, and most recently, the photographs…
Nearly 18 years after his death, photographer Gerald Davis is finally coming into focus. A new collection of his photos, “Strange Stories,” (AMMO Books, $39.95) presents the world through Davis’ unflinching eyes, from hyperstimulated Palm Beach socialites to gleeful nudists to moribund celebrities. Todd Oldham, the designer and TV talking head, edited the book. “Looking…
On the last day of the second coldest February in Chicago’s history, I made my way downtown to the Actors’ Equity Building on Randolph Street to gate-crash the auditions for “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.” If you’ve never been to an audition of this kind, you’d probably expect something out of the movies: a bare…
Reinier Gerritsen, ‘Hundred Years of Solitude,’ 2014 Glued to multiple gadgets and a perpetual news cycle, the 21st-century reader has challenged authors to write books that trump text messages. It’s no easy feat to find such a book, and then, to read it in its printed form. Fortunately, however, the New York City subway seems…
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