Lucy Sante

A Human Among Humans

The photographer Larry Fink never saw social events as a disposable theme. For him, they were life itself.

Rhapsodies in Bop

A recent exhibition at the Morgan showed how thoroughly at home the poet Blaise Cendrars was among visual artists.

Models for Being

A meditative essay on friendship weaves through Hua Hsu’s memoir, which is also about youth, Asian identity, zines, time, education, California, mixtapes, and more.

A Publicist in the Old Sense

My Quarantine: The Calm of Collaging

Collage is a scavenger’s art: it forms the dead matter of the past into combinations that could only occur in the present; it builds a future from ruins.

Early Developments

Mann’s River

John Ashbery (1927–2017)

He was lionized, imitated, studied, analyzed, enshrined, revered.

Virtuoso of the Tiny

Richard McGuire’s Sequential Drawings: The New Yorker Series is a tribute to the spot illustration, the unsung toiler of the magazine page.

Dylan’s Time

Dylan, through his ambiguity, his ability to throw down puzzles that continue to echo and to generate interpretations, almost singlehandedly created a climate in which lyrics were taken seriously.

The Greatest Enigma of French Film

Remembering Basquiat

The first time I met Jean-Michel Basquiat was in the spring of 1979, at the Mudd Club.

On ‘Paris Vagabond’

The Birth of Bohemia in Paris

The NYPD’s Lost Archive

The room at One Police Plaza, jammed to the ceiling with filing cabinets and boxes, and reeking of vinegar, held about 180,000 images ranging from 1914 to 1972.

Arleen

Let me play you “Arleen,” by General Echo, a seven-inch 45 on the Techniques label, produced by Winston Riley, a number one hit in Jamaica in the autumn of 1979.

Thirteen Most

One night in the 1980s, a low period for me, as I slumped on my regular stool at Farrell’s, in Brooklyn, staring into my fourth or fifth of their enormous beers, the gentleman to my left struck up a conversation.

On 'Inside Llewyn Davis'

Llewyn Davis, the folksinger protagonist of the Coen brothers’ new period film, is a creature of the here and now, not of 1961.

An Epiphany in Portobello

Vanished Paris

Charles Marville’s documentation of old Paris secures his place in the highest rank of photographic achievement.