Artists and "The Way We Live Now"

The New York Times Magazine has become a sort of Mecca for contemporary art-photographers. Last week it was Philip-Lorca diCorcia, before that was Martin Parr and then Katy Grannan and then Todd Hido, then Taryn Simon, and so on and so on. This week its Richard Barnes.


21. Kenosha, WI, 2003 Copyright Brian Ulrich

I am happy to say that his week a friend of mine also made it in. Brian Ulrich was not commissioned to do a piece for the NYTM's The Way We Live Now section, they used an image he created for his Copia series. The article is written by Michael Pollen. Michael wrote a great piece called Unhappy Meals for the NYTM a few months ago, based upon his bestseller The Omnivores Dilemma.

Is this a growing trend?


Security Cams Copyright Tim Davis

Last week another one of my favorite photographers, Tim Davis, was featured in the The Way We Live Now section of the NYTM. The above image was also taken from a preexisting series, titled Security. The article is titled Who's watching the F.B.I.?. It discusses the "Trust me anyhow" defense Bush created after the 2001 Patriot Act was passed (just another Bush fear tactic to take over the Post-9/11 world?). The author of the piece, Jeffery Rosen, talks about how the FBI has used national-security letters to scrutinize the financial data, travel records and telephone logs of thousands of U.S. citizens and residents. Between 2003 and 2005 , the F.B.I. issued more then 140,000 national-security letters, many involving people who do not have obvious connection to terrorism.

"National-security letters were authorized in 1978 as a narrow exception to federal privacy laws, and their reach was expanded in 1986 to give the F.B.I. easier access to the records of suspected spies. The F.B.I. could issue the letters only if senior officials in Washington had a factual basis for believing that the records pertained to a suspected spy or terrorist. But the Patriot Act diluted these requirements, allowing F.B.I field agents to issue the orders on their own say-so merely by asserting that they were 'relevant' to a terrorism investigation."

The Bush administration was fortunate that, shortly after the F.B.I. scandal broke, the alarm over the Justice Department's firing of prosecutors knocked it off the front page.