“Those who have earned respect should be given respect, regardless of their human faults.”

All this happened when I was young:

I stopped knowing anybody. I waited for somebody to know me. I knew most of my strangers in depth; acquaintanceship stifled this; strangeness had to be the bond. Maybe I was too small to be seen. 

 

“You could say that Jarmusch, ever the director, is engaging in exploratory casting,” writes Lucy Sante in her foreword to a new collection of Jim Jarmusch’s collages.

I read every piece of paper I could get my hands on: local ad circulars, obsolete reference books, collections of antediluvian Broadway wit.

Lucy Sante on the uncanny disturbance of the crime-scene photograph.

The United States is perhaps not the most violent country in the world, but few other nations have ever produced photographs like these.

Found photographs are memories that have gone feral.

Lucy Sante shares her archive of haunting vintage photographs of the masked and anonymous.

Fotonovela, fumetti, roman-photo—the form, which never got much traction in Anglo-Saxon countries, was associated with the poor and unlettered, the naive and sheltered and perhaps delusional.

Getting yourself photographed was a pastime and an existential necessity. It reminded you that you existed outside your own head. It showed you your face as others would see it.

Lucy Sante on the uncanny disturbance of the crime-scene photograph.

Spirit photographs never fail to be eerie, if only because of their tawdriness.

Its authorship mistakenly attributed to its copy editor and issued in a single edition of five hundred by a suburban publisher of quickie romances, the posthumous memoirs of the celebrated French poet Jean Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1933) must count amo…

Now that dogs have acquired the ability to speak, what are we to make of their discourse? Previously we might have expected them to be simple in both their desires and their expressions, limiting themselves to requests for food and play. While those …

I have it on the highest authority that summer will never end. It might get cooler, intermittently, but it will never stop being summer. Which is of course wonderful, because summer is a bubble during which life’s ordinary rules are suspended. Summ…

Judging by its austere style, this picture might have been taken by a member of the Crewe Circle, a group of British spirit photographers active in the early twentieth century. It could possibly be the work of Ada Emma Deane (1864–1957), who was in…

I plan to exit from my house before the end of the fiscal year. No, I don’t mean I intend to leave it, physically. I’m here in my basement, as I always have been, and where would I go? But I will install a policy of silent noncooperation with the…

On the appeal of junk shops.This summer we’re introducing a series of new columnists. Today: Luc Sante, who is reviving his blog on pictures, Pinakothek. Luc was interviewed in our Spring issue. (He contributed the portfolio, too.) Junk shops are dis…

Until the mideighties,” Luc Sante says, “I was pretty unaware that what was ­going on all around me was specific and special, but I was fed by its vibration . . . New York City kind of ended for me at the same time that my youth did.” The following magazine ­covers, collages, and flyers are documents of that lost youth, with annotations by Sante.