Minnesota Landscape Arboretum
Blurbing Books
It is hard to get used to sitting still at this time of year. Krista reminded me that last year at this time we were in Northern California. I should be in Northern New York right now, but I’ve been procrastinating and writing here, trying to catch my stride again after having my breath kicked out of me by the (expected) death of my mother. I am starting to feel like my mind and eyes are working again, and there are a few things I meant to say something about that I keep forgetting.
As I mentioned in my confession about changing paths, I think I want to rediscover making photographs again. It’s been a long time. Many of the people I read in the beginning of this public writing exercise were also “lapsed” photographers (who knew that was such a large category?). One of them, James Luckett, published a book this February called Suginami. I confess, I’m one of the ten or so people who must have rushed to buy it. We really don’t know each other, but I was really interested about in what sort of quality a Blurb book might be capable of—because I’ve been thinking about making a few books myself, of past and future work. Thinking about this book and searching out the links lead me to an interview with James that points directly at the sort of feelings I’m having about such an enterprise:
James: I’ve never had any real idea of an audience. I can think of about ten people - relatives and friends - who might purchase a hard copy of Suginami. Beyond that, its hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to own the book. It’s been about eight years since I’ve made any real physical object that might be of interest to another. Nearly everything over those years existed publicly only in digital form on the Internet, a fairly passive sort of dissemination. So if I do have any kind of audience, that’s what I imagine, people out there sitting at a terminal browsing the Internets staring at rastorized ephemeral bytes. To think of my work taking up space, as something to physically contend with, manipulate, is a little unsettling. I worry about the responsibility of sending things into the world.
I haven’t started printing again yet, but when I relocate to New York I plan on it. James’s story is eerily similar to mine; I didn’t print for a forensic lab, but I did do a lot of work in medical photography and popular snapshots at a high volume lab in Arkansas as well as slides from x-rays, etc. while I lived in California. I stopped photography just prior to entering graduate school rather than after, and I changed relationships and states (and am about to again [edit: just states, relationship fine- sorry love). Our styles couldn’t be more different, or desires in what we expect photography to be/do. But one thing is common—I also worry about the responsibility of sending things out into the world, not to mention the weight of simply being in the world. I feel a lot lighter now, than I did eight or so years ago when I started this, and perhaps it’s really time to make something.
The Blurb books are pricy, but judging from James’s book and another limited edition, A Night at the Met by Larry Fink (an old hero of mine), the possibilities are good. I’ve read only one horror story so far, and when I get settled in New York I will definitely look into it more closely.
Relevant Radio, Golden Valley, MN
Spaced Out?
Art Sinsabaugh, Collector
I think looking back as far as about 37 when I was a kid with a cheep, chintzy camera that I had, I really was documenting my home town. In color. Kodachrome slide stuff. So I think it’s just a continuation of that and I don’t think … I think of these things as a collection, like I used to collect sand, I used to collect stamps, coins, rocks … when I had different interests that was supportive or generated the interest I don’t know what. I just think of this as another form of collecting. I know that when I went to Champaign from Chicago I had a hell of a job getting started again, and I suddenly realized that I shouldn’t be bringing back [?] posts and doors and rocks I should stop that. And after about two months I started photographing, bringing back photographs. Otherwise, bringing back the objects was a substitute for it.
Art Sinsanbaugh interviewed by Ralph Gibson (1978) for the book Landscape (1980)
I find the contrast between Art Sinsabaugh’s take on collecting and Sam Wagstaff’s to be really interesting, especially given the parallel disavowal of art. For Wagstaff, collecting photographs was fetishistic in a private sense—a search for erotic pleasure. For Sinsabaugh, it is an extension of seizing the real world and real world objects in a simpler pleasure of possession. Photographs are documentary, but in the sense that you get to take bits of the world home like a souvenir. I seem to recall that Susan Sontag used a line something like “to photograph is to collect the world.”
The Shape of Content
Shahn, Ben. The Shape of Content. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.
Shahn's Harvard art lectures
- Artists in Colleges
- The Biography of a Painting
- The Shape of Content
- On Nonconformity
- Modern Evaluations
- The Education of an Artist
It is only within the context of real life that an artist (or anyone) is forced to make such choices [between values and wants]. And it is only against the background of hard reality that choices count, that they affect a life, and carry with them that degree of belief and dedication and, I think I can say, spiritual energy that is a primary force in art. I do not know whether that degree of intensity can exist within the university; it is one of the problems the artist must consider if he is to live there or work there. (10-11)
Shahn lists three major problems with the university's efforts at arts education. The first is dilettantism. Shahn cites the "Visual Arts Report," p. 65:
Dale Street
Historical Misappropriation
I much prefer the outlook of Nan Goldin, from this same series.
One of my concerns as a researcher is differentiating between “historical reconstruction” and “contemporary appropriation.” This is a major problem in photographic scholarship, where it leads to appalling mistakes such as those evidenced in the Peter Galassi video above. His observations are, to put it mildly, embarrassing. When watching the BBC series "The Genius of Photography", I was so put off I failed to watch the rest of the series for a long time afterward. Never mind that it has its brilliant (and accurate) moments from Geoffrey Batchen and others, but this pompous diatribe from Galassi grates on me like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Twin Cities Blues
Golden Valley, MN
Hamline Center
Plurality and Chaos
It is commonly assumed that the first human picture of the world was a mess: fragmentary sensations, unstructured but simply registered by unreflecting experience, severally endowed with spirits or demons by the just-evolving human imagination, only reprocessed later into coherent schemes by prehistoric bricoleurs who constructed the first categories. The earliest world-pictures we know about, however, are not of this kind. Human intellects make sense of things and, if anything, err on the side of coherence. Geniuses of my acquaintance, who almost seem clever enough to make sense of the world if they so wished, are more likely to accept it as a muddle than the common man who invests it with a transcendent character of its own or recognizes it as filled with divine purpose in which nothing is out of place. Pluralism and chaos are harder to grasp - harder, perhaps, to understand and certainly to accept - than monism and order. For a whole society to accept an agreed world-picture as senseless, random and intractable, people seem to need a lot of collective disillusionment, accumulated and transmitted over many generations.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
via Waggish
I found this snippet fascinating, and was oddly intrigued by the story of this man's run-in with the Atlanta police. "Human intellects make sense of things and, if anything, err on the side of coherence" — I think this is perhaps the wellspring of photography, trying to relate and implied coherence hidden from the casual glance.
Maple Grove, MN
Brookdale Center
The gradual fade-out of marginal malls has prompted a thriving Web culture dedicated to sharing information about dead or dying properties. Sites such as Flickr.com, Deadmalls.com and Labelscar.com are drawing traffic from mall employees, shoppers and other mall mourners who swap stories, photos and predictions about the status of centers on their way out.
Recession Turns Malls Into Ghost Towns - WSJ.com
Perspective(s)
A truly inspiring exercise in hermeneutics, following on the heels of my ruminating on the power of the plural yesterday.
