Time-Image Networks
As our methodology developed, we discovered that each new picture, when combined with an earlier image, forms a mutually dependent pair with fresh potency. Viewed in the same context, both photographs seem to extend beyond their own time frameworks and refer to an intervening period without actually describing a specific course of events. Thus, they enact the potential for an unusual dialectic about a changing landscape, a discourse that may be continued through time, activated by repeating the first images over and over. The earliest pictures mark the starting point, but no one image, first or latest in the series, represents a definitive statement. Each is simply another perspective in an ongoing time-image network. (Mark Klett)
The idea of participating with a site was reinforced by coming to see how each place might variously be represented by the photographer. Each series of photographs I took reminded me of a phenomenological exercise in perception—as if I were moving from vantage point to vantage point asking perceptual and conceptual questions about the place and receiving an appropriate response each time in the form of the resulting image.
My experience at each site became an interaction, a kind of double funnel: a flood of awareness poured in from the site and my selected responses seemed to pour back onto it. My experience was both an exchange and interchange, an engaging and a blending, an agreement and an affirmation. (Rick Dingus)
Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project (1984)
Social Network
Few persons are aware of the extent to which this art is practiced, or how deeply it has interwoven itself with all social habits. From being an article of luxury the simple photograph has become by its inherent attractiveness and usefulness, one of the necessities of civilized life. It can be produced so cheaply that the very poorest can patronize it, and its best production so nearly approach works of high art as to make it welcome with those who value it only for its intrinsic merit. It therefore adapts itself to all the varying means and conditions of a society, and its cultivators find in every civilized community a means of obtaining an honorable livelihood. Granted that, as an artist, the photographer occupies a very humble position in the eyes of the public, yet the fact remains that not only in our large cities are there to be found prosperous photographic establishments, but our smaller towns also support them, and few large villages even exist but some adept in the art ekes out his means, if he does not entirely support himself by it. Nothing can, therefore, better prove how exactly adapted this singular art to meet a craving want of our common nature. In the smallest communities, long before the penny newspaper has arisen, or the railway station has made its appearance, the photographer will have established himself a “local habitation and a name.”
Jabez Hughes, “Photography as an Industrial Occupation for Women” Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin No. 4 (1873) 162-166
Inns of Court
Things look a little different at 3rd (now Kellogg) and Cedar these days. But maybe not all that different, really.
My bucket's got a hole in it
Taken from Silver Cities by Peter Bacon Hales
I was thinking about this image this morning, while listening to Hank Williams singing “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in it.” I thought I had blogged the image before, and indeed I had.
Four years ago—the mind reels. I used to write about photography and stuff. I wonder what happened? I think it must have something to do with the process of graduate education. Now I really can’t buy no beer.
