photography
>Why don’t we read photographs?
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Saïd Nuseibeh reflects on writing and the power of an image @ Talking Writing.
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but you will rarely find twenty words written about a photograph. There are many reasons for this. Having spent the past 26 years of my life as a professional photographer, a few of them stick out and worry me like splinters.
I’ve long taken it for granted that photography is a form of writing, the difference being only a matter of alphabet. To my mind, I am articulating with light rather than with words, but my intention is the same as that of a literary author: I want to communicate observations and ideas about the world around us that merit preservation.
Saïd Nuseibeh on Amazon As with literary works, some photographs are epic, some lyrical. Some tell a story, others reveal a state of mind. Some misrepresent, some augment. Some are factual, others suggestive.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )So why don’t people discuss photographs as often and as intelligently as they do writing?
>Our mechanized existence
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James Polchin on the history and relevancy of 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge @ The Smart Set.
In her book Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge, Rebecca Solnit writes that one of the most common phrases of the late 19th century was “the annihilation of time and space.” The steamship, the telegraph, the railroad — what Emerson called “one web” of a “thousand various threads” — and the photograph each played a role in destroying older notions of time and place. But as Solnit suggests, at heart of this annihilation was a conviction that viewed “the terms of our bodily existence as burdensome,” and that believed technology could do for us what our bodies couldn’t.
You can’t get better evidence for this burdensome body than the photographs that Muybridge made of Leland Stanford’s white racehorse Occident. The animal’s body was carved into a sequence of 24 silhouetted images that record the graceful form of the animal’s gait. These motion studies, as they are known, were a first of their kind and were a precursor to the moving image. Because of Muybridge’s motion studies, we learned that for a split second, a galloping horse has all four hooves off the ground — a reality never witnessed before. Muybridge photographed Occident at Stanford’s Palo Alto estate in the spring of 1872 with the aim of improving the racehorse’s performance. Using a sequence of cameras set along a marked path, Muybridge transformed the body of the animal into an object frozen in time to be studied and improved. The symbolic force of the railroad millionaire turning his prized racehorse into a series of mechanical images cannot be overstated. And it was Muybridge who enacted this feat of industrial will.
>The democracy of images
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Susie Linfield on the photographs of Sept. 11th @ Guernica.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )“We are in a tension between the speed of history—which happens very, very fast—and progress, which happens very, very slowly,” Gilles Peress wrote in 1999. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, history happened fast, and the pace hasn’t let up since. But it was within this calamitous event that, I believe, Peress realized his vision of photography’s democratic possibilities. 9/11 turned out to be a defining moment in Peress’s work, though in indirect and unanticipated ways. And what it showed is that there are no aesthetic answers to the questions he has been posing about photography’s place in the world, only democratic—which is to say, political—ones.
A week after the assaults, Peress and three friends—curator Alice Rose George, photography professor Charles Traub, and writer Michael Shulan—opened a storefront exhibition of photographs, called “Here is New York,” in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood. The organizers put out an open call for photographs from “anybody and everybody”: not just professional photographers but all the amateurs—all the citizens—who had become documentarians of the city’s crisis on 9/11 and in the strange, unprecedented days that followed. More than five thousand pictures poured in to the exhibition, which displayed them without attribution (photographs by Magnum stars were mixed with those by unknowns). The organizers’ aim was to gather, and show, images that portrayed the array of experiences that we now call, in a kind of shorthand, “9/11.” This meant documenting not just the attacks themselves—captured in those still-breathtaking pictures, taken from so many locations by so many people, of the planes crashing into the towers and the subsequent conflagrations—but all that surrounded them.
>On looking at those who don’t want to be seen
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James Polchin writes on the pleasures and pitfalls of voyeurism at Tate Modern @ The Smart Set
Recently I’ve been experimenting with my digital camera, performing what I call “street shootings.” I set the autofocus, hold the camera casually at my waist and walk around the streets of Paris shooting away at storefronts and pedestrians. The soft click of the shutter catches some people’s attention, raising their curiosity about what’s going on. Is he taking a photo? Is he taking a photo of me?
The result nets a lot of bad photos: blurry, odd composition, horrible lighting. But once in a while will come a couple of photos that capture a fleeting moment when the perspective and the light and the pedestrians come together in a way that I could never had achieved otherwise. Often the best photos catch a person walking down a street thinking they are in their own private moment and are not the serendipitous subject of my camera. I sometimes feel a bit guilty with these walks, knowing that beneath them is a morbid intrigue about intruding on strangers who never consented to my lens.
I say morbid for from its earliest invention to our digital age there has been an uneasiness with photography and the pleasures and horrors it records. This uneasiness is precisely what confronts you at the Tate Modern’s “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance & the Camera.” A warning — this large and unwieldy exhibition may unearth unsettling experiences between you and photographs.
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>The Solitary Writer in a Database World
>Italo Calvino wrote a short story back in the 1950s entitled “Adventures of a Photographer” published in his collection Difficult Loves. In the story, the main character Antonino complains about the way we take photographs of only those happy moments in our lives, recording just fragments of a life lived (this was before life blogging). So instead, he sets out to record practically every moment of his life, and specifically every moment of his new relationship with his girlfriend Bice who eventually gives up on his increasing obsession that verges on mania. So Antonio begins photographing his Bice’s absence, until, at the end of the story, he is left with only a pile of fragmented photographs and tenuous hold on reality.
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| “Man Writing” by Oliver Ray |
I remembered this story when I read a review of Viktor Mayer-Schonberger Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
It is not just photographs that we are swimming in each day to organize and reorganize. At Publishing Perspectives Chris Kubic writes of the future book as “not as physical objects, but as relational databases.” By this he means “something that stores information in a structured, organized way.” But there is something suspicious about turning the idea of a book into a database. Perhaps this concept works better with those stuffy poorly written how-to manuals about planning for your retirement or building an outdoor deck, or even self-help books that promise a new life in seven easy steps. But what of the more crafted, imagined works, where the fragments of sentences and words, of paragraphs and chapters are more than the their parts. Would the creative book (fiction or non-fiction) become, like the cds, cut up and purchased in its parts? Would we then begin to organize our own book lists (i.e. playlists) on our ipads and kindles?
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| from Publishing Perspectives |
Jed Perl at The New Republic reflects on a different kind of “relational” experience in the act of writing: that between writer and reader. Amid our conversations about texts and tweets and nooks, what has happened, Perl asks, to the place of the solidary writer? “Writing, initially a very private act, has the potential to become an overwhelmingly public act. I realize that this is part of the excitement of writing. I’ve experienced that excitement firsthand. But how a writer chooses to negotiate the transition between the privacy of writing and the publicness of reading will ultimately determine what kind of a writer he or she is. Writers who publish with small circulation magazines and tiny, non-commercial presses can sometimes achieve an astonishingly powerful presence, because they’ve acquired their readers gradually, incrementally, one by one.”
Perl wishes to recover some sense of the solitary, private act of the writing process, and to recognize that writing is a determined transition from the private to the public. It may be a hopeful wish to hold onto this notion, for there are fewer discussions about the private act of writing (where are the new and innovative start-up money and grants to support the act of writing?) as with the public expression, circulation and retrieval of such writing. Perl’s ideas speak to the very premise of this blog: writing in public–the way we write now.
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