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.

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.

Writing from Valencia, Eduardo Montes-Bradley finds Zuloaga's canvases in the Museo de Bellas Artes and, from Sorolla's dark twin to the red and black roosters of El gallo negro, traces the two Spains — from the crack of 1898 to the Civil War songs of Republican refugees in Buenos Aires.

Nanjing accumulated its past, layer upon layer. Valencia did something stranger — it kept some layers and erased others. Reading a city through what remains, and what was made to disappear.

I recently rewatched Chronicle of a Summer, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's 1961 film, for the first time in nearly fifty years. I must have first seen it as a young teenager. The strange thing this time around was the math: this film was shot in the summer of 1960 — basically the moment I was born. Watching it again, I found myself looking less at "subjects" in a sociological experiment and more at my own parents' generation, caught on camera at exactly the age they would have

Pilar Roca Escalante visita o ateliê de Marcelo Soares em Timbaúba e traça o retrato do xilogravurista e cordelista de Olinda, herdeiro do "poeta-repórter" José Soares. Entre rendeiras, violeiros, o pavão misterioso e as vestes do cangaço, suas gravuras transpõem em imagem a música e a alma do Nordeste.

In the Jim Crow South, Black men and women paid to step into the photographer’s studio and be seen as they chose. The Holsinger Studio Collection holds the record of that quiet defiance.

A modernist bronze of a woman — commissioned by Colonel Frank "Brandy" Brandstetter, founder of Las Brisas — leads back to a Carrara dynasty, to Rodin, and to the one building where Ponzanelli's marble met Tiffany's glass.

A New Orleans Creole melody from the 1840s holds the edges of twenty-first-century Bucharest. Cristi Puiu's Aurora is cinema of formal austerity, post-socialist collapse, and one man's inevitable violence — framed entirely by Gottschalk.

I use medium format photography to calm my anxiety. To feel at ease. To walk around the neighborhood without a destination. And to experience what feels like an ancient sensation — of being one with the image.

The numbers do not fully absorb. As of this writing, 1,783 cultural heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed in Ukraine since February 24, 2022. Among them, 46 have been completely erased. The Ministry of Culture counts 346 artists and 132 media workers dead. These are not collateral casualties. They are the point.

Wagner's film traces O'Keeffe's journey from Midwestern roots through the New York avant-garde and into the New Mexican desert, weaving through it a persistent and very American anxiety: the question of cultural identity. What is American art? What is American? It is a concern that feels more urgent in the United States than perhaps anywhere else. I had assumed this preoccupation belonged in the 1800s, in times of the Centenary, the Gilded Age. But it seems the quest carried

Giacomo Puccini’s younger brother Michele died unknown in Rio in 1891, after a duel and a flight from Jujuy. The warning that kept Giacomo in Italy reached me through Héctor Tizón — a Jujuy judge — in a film I directed twenty-five years ago.

Before Brazil painted itself, the world saw it through other people's hands. Debret's three folios, a sixteen-year-old Manet on a school ship, and the foreign eye on imperial Rio.

A filmmaker's reckoning with the festival circuit — who finances whom, why public money raised in cinema's name never reaches the maker, and the day the screen became a chamber for amplifying everything but the film. The author is keeping his films, and his right to choose.

A documentary portrait of American woodcut master Julius John Lankes — filmed by Eduardo Montes-Bradley and Soledad Liendo — tracing a pastoral vision of agrarian America, a lifelong friendship with Robert Frost, and a defiant career undone at last by the Cold War machine it had always refused to serve.

A Tuesday afternoon between meetings at the Frost Art Museum at FIU, where Modern Cuban Painters from Havana to New York: Revisited returns the landmark 1944 MoMA exhibition to American walls eighty-two years later.

Robert C. Morgan visits Paul Chaleff's Pine Plains studio and finds a sculptor working the fault line where two dimensions become three — where a vessel becomes a sculpture, where function dissolves into form. A meditation on clay as a tactile counterweight to the digital fatigue of our age.

How three documentaries — on Daniel Chester French, the Piccirilli Brothers, and George Frederick Bristow — became, almost by accident, a trilogy about the nineteenth-century American search for a cultural identity. A reflection on sculpture, music, authorship, and the long shadow of Massa-Carrara.