Publication

The big picture

He was already gaining a reputation as a feral, hard-rocking provocateur, but in 1969, when Iggy Pop posed for Peter Hujar in a small studio overlooking Madison Square Park in New York, he still had the look of a sweet kid. In these images, which...

The true story of Marilyn Monroe

For most of us, Marilyn Monroe appears first in the glare of a flashbulb. Before she is a person, a performance, a life, she is already an image: platinum hair, parted lips, beauty mark, half-closed eyes, symbolising a story about 20th-century...

The other political circus

The co-founder of Giffords Circus, Nell Stroud, grew up in Oxford and had a place at the university when she took a gap year to work as a drudge at Circus Flora in St Louis, Missouri; it changed the course of her life. She finished her degree but...

Laura Cumming: politics at the Biennale

Dear Reader

In today’s New Review, our wonderful art critic Laura Cumming has a first look at the National Gallery’s exhibition of the Spanish painter Zurbarán. We are thrilled to be able to offer Observer readers an exclusive two-for-one offer to this show, which...

The big picture

Andrea Modica’s photograph of an idle summertime swim captures the ripples of a decade-long relationship Two men idle in a summertime pond surrounded by reeds, one on his back with his face to the sky, the other standing (or treading water) with his...

The big picture

In 2023, Will Vogt published a monograph that gave a strikingly candid insight into the excesses of upper-class American life: the yachts, the druggy parties, the exotic pets, the blood sports. Entitled These Americans and mainly focused on the...

Contributors

• Philippe Sands QC (p8) is a human rights lawyer and regular Observer contributor. His books include The Ratline and 38 Londres Street. • Anna Leszkiewicz (p11) is The Observer’s arts editor. For New Review she has written on Gisele Pelicot, Chloe...

The big picture

It may look, especially at this time of year, as though they’re taking a break from an Easter parade. With their big orange shoes and plump yellow bodysuits, they could be taken for the kind of cute fluffy chicks that, in the paschal context, are...

The big picture

Rania Matar’s photograph of a Lebanese woman on the border with Israel is revealing due to what it keeps hidden The building in the foreground is in Kfarkila, in southern Lebanon. The land beyond it is northern Israel. The border wall then in...

The big picture

Seungho Kim’s triumphant picture of a ‘perfect’ fried egg is a marvel of ordinary, imperfect family life It could be viewed as a face-off between two elements vying for primacy in South Korean households. Since 1960 the country’s fertility rate has...

Reading between the lines

Melissa Denes explores the age-old question of Sean Penn’s face

The big picture

Two women erupt in glee in this image by an unknown photographer – but what exactly are they laughing at? Who are the two women in this image and what are they laughing at? If it was the work of a famous photographer – and it could be, with its...

Katherine Cowles on Cynthia Erivo’s Dracula

Kenan Malik on the origins of Maga Xavier Greenwood on becoming Jewish Rowan Moore on Jayden Ali’s radical London vision Katherine Cowles on Cynthia Erivo’s Dracula

Andrew Motion on John Berryman

The big picture

Kalpesh Lathigra can’t remember taking this photograph, though he knows it was early one morning last summer in Junagadh, in the western Indian state of Gujarat. The colour of the sari would have drawn his eye: that shade of blue appeals to him. But...

The big picture

If these structures shot in the Gobi desert by Zhang Kechun look truly cinematic, it’s because they are Encountered individually, these majestic structures rising out of the Gobi desert in northern China might inspire a sense of wonder and awed...

The big picture

It’s the mid-1960s, Beatlemania is at its height and four familiar faces peek out through the gap in a woman’s overcoat in this photograph by Joseph McKenzie, taken in the Gorbals area on the south side of Glasgow. She looks very fashionable in her...

The big picture

Nearly half a century has passed, and at least one of its subjects is dead, but this photograph by Nan Goldin feels as vital as the night it was taken – at a purple-hued bar in Boston, in 1978. Goldin later displayed it in New York clubs and galleries...