Actor Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. 

Book of the day
Review

Look at Me by Dustin Hoffman review – an era-defining actor says his piece

At 89, the star of the Graduate and Rain Man demonstrates both brilliance and a startling lack of self-awareness

Peter Bradshaw
Monday 9 November 2026

The choice of title for an actor’s autobiography can be revealing. Sylvester Stallone went with The Steps, conflating life’s challenging progress with those steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that Rocky euphorically ran up. Michael Douglas cheerfully and unreflectively called his One Helluva Ride.

 

PHOTO: Guido Guidi Col tempo, 1956–2024

Guido Guidi reads and threads together the signs of the world. He collects and observes rather than claiming to “create.” He seldom speaks in the first person and, by conviction, steers clear of the personalism of “I”. He favors silence over speech, suggestion over symbol, the epigram over the manifesto, the quotation over the declaration. He delights in ambiguity, misreading, wordplay, and transgression, and, in his reserve, most often speaks through the words of others, “in quotation marks”. For all this—and indeed because of it—he is regarded as a master by several generations of artists.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: LE BAL Archive

PHOTO: Gregory Crewdson-Eveningside

In the meticulously staged photographs of Gregory Crewdson, everyday life is transformed into a quiet, cinematic enigma. Over the past three decades, the American photographer has developed a distinctive visual language that blurs the boundary between film and photography. His images are carefully constructed like movie scenes—complete with actors, elaborate sets, lighting crews, and detailed storyboards—yet they ultimately result in a single, silent frame. For Crewdson, photography is defined by its stillness: there is no narrative before or after the captured moment, only the unresolved mystery held within the image.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Templon Archive

My best shot / Gregory Crewdson / The woman was an alcoholic

PHOTO: Diane Arbus-Sanctum Sanctorum

Few photographers have probed the human condition with the curiosity and unsettling clarity of Diane Arbus. Throughout the 1960s, Arbus turned her camera toward people who existed both at the center and at the margins of society—individuals whose lives rarely appeared in the carefully polished imagery of postwar America.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fraenkel Gallery Archive

 

 

PHOTO: Carrie Mae Weems-The Heart of the Matter

Carrie Mae Weems is one of the most influential contemporary artists. Her work explores how images create history, form memory, and determine who is seen and who remains invisible. Using her own biography as a starting point, she develops an oeuvre that goes far beyond the personal and investigates issues of identity, belon- ging, and representation. To this end, she employs documentary, staged, and con- ceptual strategies, developing a visual language that is equally poetic and political.

By Dimitris Lempesis

 

PHOTO: Martin Parr-We Are Martin Parr (Part II)

In a world saturated with vivid images, exaggerated colors, and carefully constructed visual narratives, the photography of Martin Parr remains remarkably relevant. The intense colors, close-up perspectives, and seemingly ordinary scenes that define his work have become familiar visual codes of contemporary culture, appearing daily in advertising, social media feeds, and travel photography. Yet decades before these aesthetics became widespread, Parr was already examining how people consume, perform, and represent their lives through images (Part I).

 

By Dimitris Lempesis

Photo / Martin Parr-We Are Martin Parr (Part I)

 

 

In a world saturated with vivid images, exaggerated colors, and carefully constructed visual narratives, the photography of Martin Parr remains remarkably relevant. The intense colors, close-up perspectives, and seemingly ordinary scenes that define his work have become familiar visual codes of contemporary culture, appearing daily in advertising, social media feeds, and travel photography. Yet decades before these aesthetics became widespread, Parr was already examining how people consume, perform, and represent their lives through images.

By Dimitris Lempesis

Roberto Gómez Bolaños / The tragedy and squabbling left behind by Mexico’s biggest comedian

Roberto Gómez Bolaños

Roberto Gómez Bolaños

The tragedy and squabbling left behind by Mexico’s biggest comedian

The former wife of ‘Chespirito’ is immersed in a battle for the TV star’s fortune

• El luto público de la viuda de Chespirito

VERÓNICA CALDERÓN Mexico City 25 SEP 2015 - 17:14 CEST

Florinda Meza and Roberto Gómez Bolaños during one of their skits in the 1990s.

The legacy of one of Latin America’s most popular television comedians, Roberto Gómez Bolaños – better known by his stage name Chespirito – has always been tainted by controversy. But since his death on November 28, 2014 at the age of 85, the bitter fights between fellow cast members on his television shows – including recent statements made by his widow and co-star, Florinda Meza – have kept his name fresh in the minds of his fans.

Doodle / Roberto Gómez Bolaños, Chespirito

 

Roberto Gómez Bolaños
CHESPIRITO

Today’s Doodle celebrates the 91st birthday of the iconic Mexican comedian, entertainer, writer, composer, television director, and producer Chespirito, best known for creating and starring in some of the most beloved television series in Mexican history.

 

PATRICIA BOLAÑOS

The rise of the intellectual influencer: Why the fashion industry is turning to writers and artists

Luxury brands and social media algorithms, working hand in hand, are elevating intellectuals, creating book clubs and sponsoring literary and artistic prizes. Welcome to the internet’s most cerebral season yet

 

The Book of Emma Reyes: A Memoir 

(A Penguin Classics Hardcover)

de Emma Reyes (Autor), Daniel Alarcón (Traductor, Introducción) 

“Startling and astringently poetic.” —The New York Times

A literary discovery: an extraordinary account, in the tradition of The House on Mango Street and Angela’s Ashes, of a Colombian woman’s harrowing childhood

Emma Reyes (1919-2003)

 

Emma Reyes

Emma Reyes (1919–2003) was a Colombian painter and writer whose work vividly captures themes of displacement, memory, and resilience. Unrecognized for much of her life, her fame surged posthumously with her haunting memoir, “The Book of Emma Reyes (Memoria por correspondencia)”. Her literary prose and visual art intimately expose the harsh realities of a poverty-stricken childhood in Bogotá, offering a powerful narrative of survival, identity, and artistic self-realization.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: White Cube Gallery Archive

Emma Reyes / Portraits

Emma Reyes
Portraits

Eiko Yamazawa

 

Eiko Yamazawa (Japanese, 1899-1995)
(Untitled (Yasue Yamamoto as Okichi in “Elegy for a Woman” by Yuzo Yamamoto))
c. 1943-1944, printed 1944
Gelatin silver print
Image: 15 x 10.5cm (5 7/8 x 4 1/8 in.)
Mat: 50.8 x 40.64cm (20 x 16 in.)
Frame (outer): 54.61 x 44.45cm (21 1/2 x 17 1/2 in.)
Tomoka Aya, The Third Gallery Aya
© Yamazawa Eiko

Eiko Yamazawa (Japanese, 1899-1995)

Eiko Yamazawa (山沢 栄子, Yamazawa Eiko, February 19, 1899 – July 16, 1995) was a renowned Japanese photographer. She is considered one of Japan’s earliest women photographers and is among the few women photographers in Japan who were active both before and after World War II. First trained in Nihonga, she later studied photography in the U.S. under the mentorship of Consuelo Kanaga, and also exposed to the work of Kanaga’s contemporaries such as Paul Strand and Edward Weston.

Eiko Yamazawa / Reviving the forgotten influence of a pioneering female photographer

View Gallery8 Photos

Reviving the forgotten influence of a pioneering female photographer

by MARIGOLD WARNER

Ahead of the opening of Eiko Yamazawa’s first posthumous retrospective in Tokyo, curator Tsukasa Ikegami discusses the importance of the Japanese photographer’s abstract work, and why her legacy has largely been forgotten

 

PREVIEW: Japanese Women Photographers-From 1950s to Now

Rewriting the story of Japanese photography through the eyes of women and showcasing the work of 27 groundbreaking artists from the 1950s to today, the exhibition “Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now” highlights the perspectives that have shaped how Japan sees itself – and how it is seen by the world.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Photographers’ Gallery Archive

 

PHOTO: Deborah Turbeville-Photocollage

The American photographer Deborah Turbeville (1932–2013) challenged and reshaped both fashion photography and the ways of working with the photographic image in an artistic context. She belonged to no particular school or movement, yet from the 1970s onwards developed a deeply personal visual language – characterised by a distinctive aesthetic in which timelessness, melancholy, and a sense of patina permeate her photographs.By Dimitris Lempesis

PREVIEW: Nobuyoshi Araki

Fascinated by the fundamental and inextricable triangle of sex, life, and death (it is to him we owe the words “I was no sooner out of my mother’s womb than I turned around and photographed her vagina”), Nobuyoshi Araki is tireless as a photographer, obsessed by women, often bound, and flowers, captured in the all the intimacy of their colored folds.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Hamiltons Gallery Archive

 

Nobuyoshi Araki -Impossible Love / Vintage Photographs

Nobuyoshi Araki worked in advertising after completing his studies in photography and film at Chiba University in Tokyo, devoting himself exclusively to photography as of the mid-1960s. His oeuvre spans erotic portraits of women, artificial still-lifes, photographs of plants, documentary-style depictions of everyday life, and architectural photography but also very personal, diaristic photographs of himself and his deceased wife Yoko.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: C/O Berlin Foundation