Is it the end of photography? Earlier this year Kodak declared bankruptcy. Then a few weeks later the start-up Lytro began shipping its new new digital image-making device that is not, according to press copy, a camera. It certainly doesn’t look like a camera. Most point and shoot (P&S) digitals mimic point and shoot film cameras, which have oblong bodies to accommodate the spooling of a film roll. The Lytro does away with that anachronism. Its slim profile resembles that of a slide viewer, a photographer’s magnifier, or a one-eyed View-Master more than a digital camera, and it uses a square image format like a Polaroid. It stirs up instant nostalgia for old-fashioned photography.

The Lytro doesn’t catch images on a single curved plane, like the lens of a conventional camera, but catches an entire “field of light,” so that you can point and shoot without focusing and then adjust the image for resolution later, on the device’s 1 ½" x 1 ½" touch-screen, or with software on the computer. The Lytro-produced images on the company’s website all dramatize the contrast between foreground and middle ground, obliterating elements in the distance. The device takes in a very small part of the world and gives it a funky, fish-eye artsiness. The images are distinctive but they look like they could have bee produced with a PhotoShop effect or a mobile phone app. They’re digital photographs, just a little bit twisted.

March 27, 2012 by Nalina Moses

It was bound to happen. Last month the Pritzker Prize committee named Wang Shu as their 2012 laureate, making him the first Chinese architect to receive the honor. I took a closer look at his work researching another piece, and was impressed with what I saw. Shu is well-known for building with materials salvaged from demolition sites, a practice that gives his structures an extraordinary tectonic presence. He incorporated rubble into the immense, canted walls of this textile museum in Ningbo, so that they seem to emerge naturally out of the earth.

For a long time western architects have understood mainland China as a culture that will simply copy European and North American models of design and construction. And we often look to China (and Russia, South America and India too) less as a place or a culture than as a lucrative, practically limitless new market our own work. A feature in this Sunday’s Times Magazine called “Building the American Dream in China” is typical. It focuses on the professional opportunities in China for American architects, mostly young, inexperienced ones who can’t find work here. After Shu’s Pritzker, hopefully, we’ll be looking more astutely now at what’s being built in China. The new architecture might be one that’s true to place and time, with lessons for everyone.

March 22, 2012 by Nalina Moses

There was a summit of architecture critics last week to launch Alexandra Lange’s new book Writing About Architecture. Julie Iovine scored points early on, when she said that good writing mattered far more than good criticism. She read extraordinary passages from Reyner Banham and Esther McCoy out loud, which landed those authors on my must-read list. Then she lost points at the end when she said that architects can’t write, a generalization that hits awfully close to home. The emotional highlight was when Lange read a famous excerpt from the late Herbert Muschamp’s 1997 New York Times Magazine cover story on Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. In the passage, which was even excerpted in the writer’s obituary, Muschamp describes returning to his hotel room at Bilbao, seeing a woman in a white dress on the street below, and, all at once, understanding something vital about the building. He writes, “[T]he building I’d just come from was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe." Fifteen years later the panelists still found the reference "galling” (Iovine’s word) and rattled on about the eccentricities of the writing, including its stupendous length, starchitect worship, hyperbole, and mythopoetic prose.

Their stony reactions sent me back to the original text, in which Muschamp follows the Marilyn reference with this lucid perception: “What twins the actress and the building in my memory is that both of them stand for an American style of freedom. That style is voluptuous, emotional, intuitive and exhibitionist. It is mobile, fluid, material, mercurial, fearless, radiant and as fragile as a newborn child… " Muschamp’s essay is, in addition to a hagiography of Gehry and a critical account of the building, an attempt to understand architecture as a popular culture and to claim, for just one moment, in a tumbling world order, an American cultural victory. It’s rich and magnificent overwriting, which often happens when a serious writer tackles a subject that matters dearly to him. Here the building seems too big for the writing, even Muschamp’s writing, and remains, somehow, just out of reach. The heated language makes it clear that Muschamp loves architecture, something that’s not so clear about the critics on the panel.

March 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses

In the documentary that celebrates his career covering street fashion and social events for the New York Times, photographer Bill Cunningham hits the nail right on the head, explaining, “Fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life." I doubt that any designer, theorist or fashionista could put it better. Cunningham has spent more than thirty years taking pictures of New Yorkers and what they wear, most of it from his customary haunt at 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. I spotted him once years ago at Bryant Park on the first dazzlingly warm day of spring. Women had broken out their sundresses and sandals and men had rolled back their sleeves, and the photographer was jumping around them like a kid on Christmas morning, trying to take it all in.

Cunningham has the highest respect for well-bred ladies who dress relentlessy to type – like Lee Radziwill and the late Brooke Astor – and for eccentrics who dress relentlessly to shock and delight – like Anna Piaggi. For someone with such a refined fashion eye, however, he’s outstandingly modest in his own dress. He wears a uniform of Ordinary Guy separates with a cobalt blue French worker’s jacket, the kind worn by sanitation workers. Cunningham likes the jackets, which he buys in bulk from a hardware store in Paris, because of their pockets. Along with the bike he tools around on, the blue jacket has become his emblem. Of course there are designer versions around, some precious and some less so. Junya Watanabe even collaborated on a version with L'abourer (a French heritage brand something like Barbour) for Comme des Garcons. But these high-fashion interpretations miss the point. Cunningham’s looks is so brilliant because it’s distilled and unchanging. He knows exactly who he is and doesn’t care what anyone thinks.

March 19, 2012 by Nalina Moses