January 2012
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"For Those Who Have Eyes to Hear"
From Roy DeCarava’s The Sound I Saw:
…
why the present is a crutch of
empty
bottles drowning a derelict past
in surrealistic
confusions that ride the future on
platinum hair
and plywood boxes with cast iron wheels
imperiously
impersonal and impervious to everything
hot and cold
knowing a special ignorance
only
wealth...
December 2011
1 post
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Portraits of Force
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or, the Poem of Force.”
It’s an essay on the role of force (i.e., coercive violence) in the Iliad — but Weil wrote it in 1939, so she wasn’t just writing about the Iliad. In the essay, she describes the centrality of coercion (in the form of violence, destruction, and enslavement) both to...
September 2011
2 posts
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Beaufort West
“Jaco, Beaufort West Prison, 2006.” from Beaufort West, Mikhael Subotzky, p. 72.
Mikhael Subotzky’s Beaufort West is a book about a town built around a prison. Literally — the prison is located in a traffic circle in the middle of the town. Subotzky states, “The image of the town radiating out of the prison was what really drew me to work there.” (p. 78)...
May 2011
3 posts
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The 1978 Test
“Any schoolboy or girl can make good pictures with one of the Eastman Kodak Company’s No.2 Brownie cameras.” — Kodak ad from The Youth’s Companion.
April 29, 1902. At brownie-camera.com, via @vossbrink.
In my feed reader yesterday, I came across this question:
If everybody can be a photographer, what will be the function of a professional?
at Foam. (via...
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April 2011
4 posts
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How do we think about photographs? (Cont'd)
On the 8th, I posted a question:
When you look at a photograph, what questions do you ask about it? What steps do you take in the process of making a judgment about the photograph, or in deciding how you feel about it? What happens in the time between when you first see the photograph and when you decide whether or not it is interesting to you?
I received some interesting responses. By far...
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How do we think about photographs?
Hi, folks. I have a question for you — that is, for anyone who looks at photographs and also writes or talks or thinks about them.
When you look at a photograph, what questions do you ask about it? What steps do you take in the process of making a judgment about the photograph, or in deciding how you feel about it? What happens in the time between when you first see the photograph and when...
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Twitter Account
Hey, folks. You likely already know that Karl and I are active on twitter at @kalli and @kukkurovaca, respectively. But those are personal accounts, and are correspondingly full of dick jokes, video games, and bacon. As they should be.
So, we’ve got an account set up to act as a companion to 1/125: @one250. Get it? Because tweets are short, and 1/250 is a faster shutter speed? And also...
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March 2011
3 posts
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Ruin Porn: Part 3
This is post three of three on “Ruin Porn.” (AKA: The Ruinpornomicon.) Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here. It is not necessary to read them in order.
In this post, I’m going to talk about the failings of photographs that I would call “ruin porn”, and photographs of different subjects or from different genres that may shed some light on how these subjects could be...
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Ruin Porn: Part 2
by Ana Barrado. From The Atrocity Exhibition, by JG Ballard. Re/Search edition, 1990. p. 96.
This is post two of three in what we have come to call The Ruinpornomicon. Part one is here. But they’re only tangentially related, so don’t feel compelled to start there.
The topic of part two is:
What is the nature of the viewer’s enjoyment of ruin porn?
Just what is it about...
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Ruin Porn: Part 1
“Atrium, Farwell Building,” by Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre. From The Ruins of Detroit.
For the last several weeks, I’ve been working on a post about “ruin porn.”
(For those who aren’t familiar with the term, “ruin porn” refers to photographic documentation of abandoned and/or run-down buildings and facilities. The most characteristic and...
February 2011
1 post
5 tags
More on "Literary" and "Unliterary" Photography
Earlier today, Rob Haggart at A Photo Editor put up a nice post referencing Laura Miller’s “Why We Love Bad Writing,” and the post I made in January applying one of Miller’s observations to the world of photography. (Okay, to fairly represent the chain of citation, the observation originally belonged to CS Lewis.)
Rob is optimistic about the possibilities for building bridges...
January 2011
2 posts
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Until recently, hardly anyone considered why some readers might actually prefer clichés to finely crafted literary prose. A rare critic who pondered this mystery was C.S. Lewis, who — in a wonderful little book titled “An Experiment in Criticism” — devoted considerable attention to the appeal of bad writing for what he termed the “unliterary” reader. Such a...
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December 2010
2 posts
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It is important to remember that an anonymous photographer is simply a photographer whose name we have lost, perhaps temporarily. When we recover it, and find out the name of his town and his wife (or her husband), we can begin writing dissertations about him or her, but the work has not changed.
John Szarkowski, interviewed by Mark Durden, via American Suburb X
As usual, Szarkowski...
November 2010
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October 2010
2 posts
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September 2010
3 posts
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August 2010
4 posts
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That said—too briefly—my argument against the set-up picture is that it leaves the matter of content to the IMAGINATION of the photographer, a faculty that, in my experience, is generally deficient compared to the mad swirling possibilities that our dear common world kicks up at us on a regular basis. That’s all.
A Photo Student › Alec Soth Interviews Tod Papageorge
I’m almost...
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Reproductions
There were a couple of interesting posts in July from Susana Raab and Joerg Colberg on the question of images (i.e., the photograph as it exists independent of the medium in which it is shown) versus prints (i.e., the photograph as print, or whatever, in the specific physical form in which one sees it).
Both Raab and Colberg express some degree of ambivalence, with which I agree. And of course,...
July 2010
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June 2010
3 posts
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May 2010
5 posts
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But there is no such thing as a simple document; even a birth certificate embodies cultural values and assumptions, requires interpretation….
Facts seldom speak for themselves; they acquire a voice by being placed in relation to other facts. The sequence of photographs in this book describes what certain places and events look like; it also suggests what they might mean. The meaning...
April 2010
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March 2010
11 posts
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On The Terry Richardsonstravaganza
You’re probably aware of the Terry Richardson extravaganza. If you’re not, take a glance at this post from A Photo Editor which provides a roundup of links to the posts which kicked the whole affair off.
The reactions in the blogsophere were interesting. Lots of people have attacked Richardson, either because of the kind of work he produces, or because of either firsthand or hearsay...
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