Guest writer Joseph Horowitz considers Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen, and the expressive power of silent cinema.

Yom Kippur invites us to reframe life and think: What have we done? What have we failed to notice? What do we owe others? What deserves repair? And what should we carry forward? And I find a peculiar connection between these questions and my work. Documentary begins with observation, followed by attention. The camera requires to spend time with an artist, with the work, the gestures, the history behind, and the contradictions within. Yom Kippur invites us to think in similar

While researching Joaquín Sorolla and Vision of Spain, I came across Ruth Matilda Anderson, the American photographer who traveled through Spain documenting its people, landscapes and traditions. A century later, I discovered that the journey I thought I was retracing had already been made.

Yesterday, while scouting locations for Visions of Spain, I returned to the old U.S. Custom House at Bowling Green. I know the building very well, or at least I thought I did. I spent time there while making Daniel Chester French: American Sculptor, because the monumental figures representing the four continents were designed by French and carved by the Piccirilli brothers. Now I’m back for Guastavino.

Exploring the Island and the Guastavino vaulted ceiling. We tend to think of Ellis Island from the American perspective: the immigrant arriving before the the skyline of the new country . But architecture travels too. For those from Barcelona, Valencia, and Naples, those vaults may not have appeared foreign. The materials, the rhythm of the arches and the logic of the construction belonged to an architectural vocabulary with roots much closer to the world they had just left b

Filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley reflects on photographing ceramic artist Paul Chaleff at work and what still photography reveals about the body, labor, clay, and memory.

Portrait of a Lady vanished from Jacques Goudstikker's Amsterdam gallery in 1940 and surfaced eighty years later above a sofa in Mar del Plata. A federal judge has now sent it home. Eduardo Montes-Bradley recalls a seventh-grade birthday party in the Argentina of the 1960s, and a woman who recognized a painting on somebody else's wall.

I came to Paul Chaleff’s studio understanding that he and Anthony Caro had worked together. What I did not yet understand was the scope of that collaboration and the circumstances that made it possible. Perhaps now...

While filming ceramic artist Paul Chaleff in Ancram, filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley encounters Haesook Kim and reflects on memory, loss, and the limits of documentary.

Just arrived in Ancram, New York, where we are planning to spend at least a week documenting Paul Chaleff at work, following the craft and process of one of America’s most celebrated ceramicist-sculptors.

The Hispanic Society had recently acquired his Portrait of a Boy (1927), and I stood in front of it longer than I meant to. It wasn't only the painting. It was the strange sensation of having walked out of one of my documentary film project and into another.

I went back to St. John the Divine, this time to take the Vertical Tour. Our guide was a parishioner originally from the German-speaking part of Switzerland whose name, regrettably, I can't remember. She was knowledgeable, patient, and seemingly quite at home leading a dozen strangers up the narrow spiral staircases and into the upper reaches of one of New York’s most extraordinary landmarks.

Vision of Spain appears documentary, but every representation of a nation is also an invention, and that makes it particularly interesting to me. Sorolla chose which regions would stand for Spain, which costumes would identify them, which ceremonies mattered, which occupations deserved monumental treatment and which fragments of everyday life could carry the weight of national identity.

We tend to think of pre-revolutionary Cuba through its popular music. Son, rumba, mambo, bolero, jazz: these have become inseparable from our historical imagination of the city. But another Cuba sounded at the same time, and its musical geography was remarkably international. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Yesterday’s walk was conceived as a journey beneath Rafael Guastavino’s domes and vaulted ceilings, beginning at Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, at Fifth Avenue and 55th Street, continuing through Grand Central Terminal, and finally descending into the ghostly loop beneath Lower Manhattan, where trains still pass through the abandoned City Hall station.

A minimal photo essay from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, tracing Rafael Guastavino's Valencian timbrel vaults from La Lonja to nearly 1,000 American buildings.

The Piccirilli Factor screens Oct 8, 2026, at the Peoria Riverfront Museum — the town where Lincoln's 1854 speech began the road to the memorial the Piccirilli brothers carved.

How Joaquín Rodrigo shaped America’s image of Spain, from the Concierto de Aranjuez to Miles Davis, and transformed a Valencian voice into a transatlantic legacy.