The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Photographer Debra Fisher Goldstein has made a habit of having fun behind the lens at our state fair.  If you didn't get enough of the best state fair in the state, be sure to check out her daily slide shows with brief commentary. All fall under the title, Beyond the Schtick of the Stick. Feel free to comment or add your own images.

Dawn Armfield is the winner of our recent photo contest, with her black and white photo published here, entitled "Tired." She wins a complimentary registration for the Hwy 12 workshop. Thanks to everyone who entered.  We received a great array iof images, subject matter, and styles -- all very evocative.  See all of the entries here, and read comments by the Workshop director, Howard Christopherson.

Matt Bakkom believes the essence of who we are as Americans is just a nail scratch below the surface. The Minnesota artist has made a career of scouring through dusty records, exploring a changing America through documents that capture the ideas and accomplishments of everyone from the infamous to Joe the Plumber.

Spend a few minutes with photographer Dona Schwartz and you’ll start to see a bit of grandeur hiding beneath humble day-to-day routines. “I want to see what’s amazing that’s right under my nose,” she explains. “To me, that’s really compelling. But to photograph daily life, you have to first really see it. You have to be really quick and really observant.”

“One thing I would never photograph,” Diane Arbus once wrote, “is dogs lying in the mud.” 

That’s an odd statement coming from a woman who looked so unflinchingly at the weird world around her. Technically there may not be any photographs of dogs lying in the mud in Revelations, the vast retrospective of the photographer’s work that is currently on display at Walker Art Center, but there are certainly scads of the portraits that many have long viewed as degraded human variants of Arbus’ one supposedly forbidden image.