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To induce a people, hitherto scattered, uncivilized and therefore prone to fight, to grow pleasurably inured to peace and ease, Agricola gave private encouragement-and official assistance to the building of temples, public squares and private mansions. He praised the keen and scolded the slack, and competition to gain honour from him was as effective as compulsion. Furthermore, he trained the sons of the chiefs in the liberal arts and expressed a preference for British natural ability over the trained skill of the Gauls. The result was that in place of distaste for the Latin language came a passion to command it. In the same way, our national dress came into favour and the toga was everywhere to be seen. And so the Britons were gradually led on to the amenities that make vice agreeable-arcades, baths and sumptuous banquets. They spoke of such novelties as 'civilization', when really they were only a feature of enslavement.
Tacitus, The Life of Gnaeus Julius Agricola
RV/MH Hall of Fame and Museum
What I Can Show and Tell
I’ll begin with what I take to be a remarkable understatement. David Gerald Orr concludes his essay “The Icon in the Time Tunnel” (a discussion of secular and vernacular icons) with this remark:Who is making an effort to logically and consistently archive vernacular icons? Ironically, many icons of our own existence are ephemeral by nature and should be recorded. The alternative is a great cultural loss to generations of future historians and “iconographers.”I call this an understatement because the loss Orr speaks of is not just a loss to future historians and iconographers, but to all of us. The ephemeral he speaks of, objects of our ordinary experience, are evidences of ourselves. From generation to generation they disappear. At any given moment they are mostly gone, for no one has saved them. With them are gone evidences of ourselves. The past is lopped off behind us. We try to remember, always absent complete archival storage. If there were complete storage of the artifacts of our lives, we’d not be able to use it, for it would overwhelm us. We have to select if we are to see, think, act, or talk. We will select, whether or not we intend to do so.
. . .
Whether knowingly or not, we’ll select what we show and tell, what we have decided through continuing rhetorical transactions is real and can be shown or told. We live in and are continuing contests, some gentle and mild, some fierce and desperate, some entirely eternal, self against self, some external, self against the other, contests in which we select what can be shown or told. Identity is a continuing rhetorical transaction as we negotiate our itineraries through the revealing through finally irrecoverable archives and through structural and stylistic maneuvers by which we select what can be shown and told.
Jim Corder on living and dying in West Texas: A postmodern scrapbook 2008
Stephen Shore on the road
Huge
on the road in Wisconsin
Making and Doing
Michael Almereyda: The reality is dreamlike and the photography is real.
William Eggleston: You know what? That doesn’t mean a thing to me.
I am really happy that Snag Films has placed some good documentaries online (for the US and Canada only, I’m afraid), including William Eggleston in the Real World. I do hope that it is the future of documentary distribution, as is claimed in the Fortune article [via]. It’s a coincidence really, because I just finished quoting/clipping some bits to discuss here. They have also released Black White and Grey, which gave me material for consideration a few weeks ago.
Eggleston’s evasions, typical in most interviews, are particularly poignant in Almereyda’s film. You get the feeling that he just might have something to say if someone asked the correct question. Otherwise, what remains except to say “no” or “I don’t think so”? The commentary he offers outside Almereyda’s insistence that emotion must play some role in what he’s doing is excitingly analogous to Aristotle’s discussion of techné and praxis in the Nicomachean Ethics.
Sylvan Learning Center, Maplewood, MN
Pumping and Dumping (the Art Marketplace)
Postmodern theory has proposed that all the questions that thoughtful photographers had begun to ask in the late 1950s and early 1960s — about the non-neutrality of photography, about lens-based observation and photographic seeing, about the tension in a photograph between its transcriptive, descriptive, translative, and interpretive aspects — were insignificant, and had in any case been answered satisfactorily.
T'ain't so, methinks. Those questions endure, still open, and such answers as we have for them — in the work of of Arbus, Friedlander, and Winogrand, among many others, along with the theories of Szarkowski and some of his successors — remain provisional, as perhaps they always will. Now that, in effect, all of those individuals have gained admission to the pantheon and all the results of their theory and practice have entered the canon, we stand poised at a particular moment of stasis: the pause between several generations that grew up with this work and its makers as living entities and those generations now to come, who will treat them as a distinct chapter in the medium's history and exemplars of an established tradition to either draw from or ignore. What they had to say to the last third of the twentieth century is in any case indelibly inscribed on the record. Let's see what the next century makes of them.
AMERICANSUBURB X: THEORY: A. D. Coleman, "Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander & Garry Winogrand at Century's End (2000)"
Coming of age as a photographer in the late 70s/early 80s, I was railed against postmodern critics such as Andy Grundberg and Peter Galassi (still do, in some respects). A.D. Coleman was a breath of fresh air, and reading his constant columns in Photo Metro and elsewhere, I had the feeling that I wasn’t completely alone in appreciating both a rich tradition and new frontiers for photography. I met Coleman at an SPE conference a few years ago, though, and I wondered how he could be so consistently luddite and backward about the future of photographic education. Mainly, judging from his web presence, I really don't feel like he "gets" the internets.
