“Harness My Zebras!”
“WHO IS THE WOMAN on the cover,” Richard Lindsay asks in the opening line of his book on Bible-based epic movies, “and why is she in a chariot being…More
Browsing: Essays
Blog Posts
How Horror Thwarted ‘The Code’
AS A GENRE known for pushing the boundaries of good taste, horror films occupy a unique position within American cinema. Because horror triggers an emotional response in audiences through…More
The Secret Life of Action Films
IF YOU WERE to ask a teenage boy what he thought of a movie that was nearly devoid of women characters and was instead filled with muscular, handsome men…More
Keeper of the Dead
Brush Fires in the Social Landscape is a twentieth-anniversary expanded and redesigned edition of a monograph with the same title published in 1994 by Aperture #137. Wojnarowicz had been in talks with Aperture’s editors about publishing a book of his work, but he died of AIDS in July 1992 before the project was completed.
MoreProust’s Way Home
“PARIS IS WHERE the 20th century was,” declared that eccentric raconteur and occasional aphorist, Gertrude Stein. Writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Stein herself, artists like Picasso, Dalí, and…More
Make Me Over, or Ripley at Midnight
“I wanna go places, I wanna do some things I wanna be a star, I wanna have a big name.” — Ike and Tina Turner, “Make Me Over” …More
Notes on Porn
1 ANDY WARHOL SAID that when he was in high school he wanted a friend, but then he got a television and he didn’t need a friend anymore. Pornography…More
The Philadelphia Phenomenon
WHEN PHILADELPHIA passed the twentieth anniversary of its release in December 2013, it was surprising to realize that the film is still Hollywood’s most successful gay-themed movie to date…More
Contemplating the Navel
Minor White (1908-1976) was renowned as one of the masters of American photography, having worked with Bernice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston.
MoreClaude Cahun’s Mirror in the Lens
“PHOTOGRAPHY is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of tableau vivant,” Roland Barthes remarked, shifting attention away from the medium’s significance as an evolutionary event in the history…More