and three-exposure photographs, in which children’s heads appear disembodied in darkness, and women and unnatural angles float in space, are by turns comic, surreal and positively jolting. They overturn the principle that a photograph captures a single instant, forming unified narratives across space and time...when a crisp exposure fused with a blurry one into a single panorama, Mr. Blumberg achieved stunning effects...By the late 1960s, as the country focused more sharply on Vietnam, Mr. Blumberg’s gaze shifted from the street to the screen. He began to photograph his television — with its space age rounded edges — as Washington made the case for war, arraying the newscasts into televisual mosaics. Lyndon Johnson, folksy but serious during the State of the Union of 1968, appears 24 times in a five-by-five grid of TV screens, the center left blank like the free space on a bingo card. In another mosaic, his successor shows off his new cabinet: Richard Nixon is fit and at ease, George Romney’s hair is lustrous, and a corpulent John Mitchell is unaware he’ll end up in prison. Mr. Blumberg’s interest in the deadening effect of mass media, and its complicity in violence, puts him closer to contemporaries like John Baldessari and Robert Heinecken than to the street photographers he emulated in his youth.

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In recent years, he has shown a particular interest in trashier forms of American media, photographing certain television shows with the closed captioning on...These new works have a degree of formal appeal — you still see the raster lines of Mr. Blumberg’s old analog television, and the closed captioning isolates an interesting tension between the image and the dialogue .. [The series] transcends cynicism for something as disquieting, and as incisive about media, as his 1960s TV collages. On the day that a gunman killed 20 children and six adults in a school less than an hour from this museum, Mr. Blumberg tuned his television to CNN and MSNBC, which he photographed throughout the day. The dozens of images feature first breaking news alerts, then pass to collaged images of slain children, then blowhard pundits, and at last President Obama at the White House, wiping away a tear. “I have never seen him so emotional,” the caption reads. It is a dignified image of the president, especially in comparison to the earlier, more biting shots of Johnson and Nixon. But given the endurance of gun violence since Newtown — a recent example took place on live television — the president’s anger and heartbreak feel as fleeting as any reality show."                                                                                            Jason Fargo

                                                                                                                                      New York Times, September 3, 2015