Among the iconic Hollywood Westerns of the 1950s, High Noon, with Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane, remains a classic movie in the most basic sense. More people know what it is than have seen it. High Noon has, in many ways, been reduced to one black-and-white image: Gary Cooper walking down an empty western street, wearing his badge, ready to draw his gun and face his enemies alone. In 1989 this film still was used, with an added red splash, as the campaign poster for Poland's Solidarity movement, Cooper-as-icon standing in for the trade-unionist Lech Wałęsa in his quest to become the country's

In the jet-set portrait extravaganza Slim Aarons: Women, the captions home in on a subject's status like surface-to-air missiles:

Mrs. A. Atwater Kent Jr. (the former Hope Hewlett Parkhurst) at H. Loy Anderson's pool, Palm Beach, circa 1955. A. Atwater Kent, her father-in-law, was the inventor who pioneered the home radio.

Lady Daphne Cameron sits on a tiger pelt in the trophy room of Laddie Sanford's Palm Beach house, 1959.

The first lady of the Philippines, Imelda Romuáldez

The idea of an autocratic regime ruling America has long been a preoccupation of alternate-history enthusiasts and sci-fi authors. With Donald Trump now in office, those fictions suddenly seem all too real. (The Republican National Convention, at which Trump bellowed "I am your voice," and insisted that he alone can fix the nation's problems, was like a scary set piece from a dystopian novel.) In 2015, Amazon began streaming a slick TV adaptation of one of this genre's best books, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. Both the book and the show take place in an alternate version of

In two days, Donald Trump will be inaugurated as President. The day after that, hundreds of thousands of women plan to meet at the Capitol and demonstrate against a new regime that has already, during its transition to power, shown itself to be plutocratic and friendly to various forms of discrimination. Like the idea of a female President, the idea of this protest, called the Women's March on Washington, seems quite reasonable. And to many it feels welcome, inevitable, even obligatory. But, as with that notion of a female President, the Women's March on Washington has proved, well before it

Women told me they had flashbacks to hideous episodes in their past after the second presidential debate on 9 October, or couldn’t sleep, or had nightmares. The words in that debate mattered, as did their delivery. Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton 18 times (compared to 51 interruptions in the first debate). His reply to the moderator Anderson Cooper’s question about his videotaped boasts of grabbing women by the pussy, which had been released a few days earlier, was: ‘But it’s locker room talk, and it’s one of those things. I will knock the hell out of Isis … And we should get on to

Critic and novelist John Berger died on Monday at the age of ninety. Here, from his introduction to a recent edition of Berger's Understanding a Photograph, Geoff Dyer considers the seminal critic's deep engagement with the medium. —Bookforum

I became interested in photography not by taking or looking at photographs but by reading about them. The names of the three writers who served as guides will come as no surprise: Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, and John Berger. I read Sontag on Diane Arbus before I'd seen any photographs by Arbus (there are no pictures in On Photography), and Barthes on