Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 2006

When I mentioned in my Tony Ray-Jones post that he attended Yale School of Art it reminded me of the current Yale Art Gallery Bulletin for 2006 as it is dedicated to photography. It is paperback, 230 pages and very nicely produced. From what I heard, the production was subsidized and the retail price of twenty dollars doesn’t even come close to covering what it cost to produce.

It is a very informative read with many articles on both photography and photographic education. There is one by Robert Adams who chose four landscape pictures from four different photographers and wrote short pieces about each. Tod Papageorge wrote a tribute to Richard Benson who has been the dean of the school for the past decade. There is a piece on Aaron Siskind and action painting. Joshua Chuang produced a fine essay called, When the Messenger Is the Medium: The Making of Walker Evans’s American Photographs and Robert Frank’s The Americans. Charlotte Cotton evaluates Yale and contemporary photography and Rebecca Soderholm contributes an essay called, The Mystery of Photographic Longevity or Keeping It Out of Dean Benson’s Trash Can, as well as many others.

It is profusely illustrated and features some of the work of recent Yale graduates alongside other works by the masters mentioned. It’s far from a complete education in itself, but then again, it didn't cost you seventy thousand dollars.

Images above are three alternate covers by Alfred Leslie for the Grove edition of Robert Frank's The Americans.