Selected Writings

Language made visual: intriguing photographs that capture the written word in the social landscape.

Native New Yorker and now Paris-based photographer Richard Kalvar (born 1944) has spent more than 50 years observing humanity through his camera’s lens. With Selected Writings, he shifts his gaze from what people reveal through their actions and facial expressions to what they reveal through written expression: graffiti, signs, T-shirts, banners, gravestones and other public inscriptions. In this work, irony and tenderness struggle for the upper hand.
Kalvar’s black-and-white photographs span his career from the late 1960s to the present, and were taken in locations across the Western world, especially in Paris, New York and London. From the odd to the surprising to the outright funny, they give a decidedly subjective overview of the public use of the written word.