One blue eye wide open, the other closed. Her mouth twisted into a grimace created in post-production, her teeth painted white against a gradient carmine-red background, almost clown-like. Half the face in color, half in black and white. It is *Untitled #632*, one of the images with which Cindy Sherman—who turned seventy-two in January—once again tackles the theme that our image-obsessed society continues to treat as a taboo: aging.

There is a photograph in which everything seems on the verge of collapsing. Two bodies close together, a direct gaze, the dim light of an ordinary interior. There is no distance, no protection. Nan Goldin wasn’t merely observing that scene—she was part of it. The same is true of Mark Morrisroe, who, in his self-portraits, transformed his own existence into visual material—unfiltered, defenseless. In the 1980s, between New York and Boston, photography ceased to be a document and became a matter o

A red car packed with kids, the tailgate open on a country road. A ball rolling down a cobblestone alley while two kids play tennis with a single racket. Hands stained with tomato breaking off pieces of bruschetta in the sun. A ride on a Vespa along the waterfront, without a helmet. The images scroll by, all looking the same, especially in the summer, across dozens of accounts: grainy film, low light, no smartphones in sight. The caption, almost always, says the same thing. Once upon a time, the