CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/3/2025

This holiday weekend, consider the Lobster!

The Fourth of July holiday is both fun and loaded. But whether you love the barbeques and the fireworks, or you fixate on contradictory aspects of our country’s history, we think there’s something special about this 1935 Lobster photograph by Madame Yevonde. Reproduced from Chromotherapia, it’s one of 170 “feel-good” color photographs selected by artist and Toilet Paper editor Maurizio Cattelan and curator Sam Stourdzé for their unusual intensity. “Color photography is often criticized and belittled,” Cattelan and Stourdzé write, “but it has been a bonanza for artists, allowing them to get out their palettes and repaint the world. Some have broken with the medium’s traditional documentary role to explore photography’s shared roots with the world of the imagination, flirting with pop culture, Surrealism, bling, camp, kitsch and the bizarre—all associated with bad taste and extravagance. But why shouldn’t the trivial and the banal also have something to tell us about our existence and the age we live in? Why should rigorous, ascetic minimalism be the only way to approach reality?”