Bison are not big, placid, hairy cows. And stopping to photograph one is something you want to think very carefully about, as many people are now no doubt aware, having watched a viral video of a grandfather being tossed eight feet into the air by a rampaging bull bison at Bridge Bay Campground near Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park. The incident was captured on video by Mike MacLeod, a professional photographer based in Bozeman, Montana. "{I]t was kicking like a rodeo horse who's clearly very agitated," MacLeod, a former combat photographer, later said of the bison.

  While epoch-defining abstract expressionist artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman hosted  photographers shooting their studio actions for features in LIFE magazine during the 1950s and ‘60s, the gallerist who put them on the map, Betty Parsons, stayed home and made paintings. Most of this work never saw light during her lifetime. But yesterday, a major exhibition, Betty Parsons: An Expanded World,opened at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard Col...