'On Photography …' Category
Reconstructions
As a preamble to their performances, traditional storytellers in Majorca would say, “It was and it was not so.” David Shields, Reality Hunger I guess I started to think about the reconstructed photograph when I first saw Sally Mann’s lovely yet disturbing photographs of her children in the now classic book, Immediate Family. She unabashedly [...]
Dandelion Ideas
In a post last year, plagiarism was the topic, citing the example of Steve Burdeny whose photographs had more than a casual resemblance to Chinese photographer Sze Tsung Leong’s images. A number of readers were unconvinced by my arguments and preferred to go with Burdeny’s explanation that the similarity came by happenstance. Others believed as [...]
Azo and Company
My daughter very thoughtfully gave me a book for Christmas, “ How to make Good Pictures” put out by Eastman Kodak in the 50s, and curiously bearing no author’s name. In the darkroom section of this historical relic I came across a mention of Kodak’s Velite paper, a contact printing paper that apparently was so [...]
Miroslav Tichý
You may have read about Miroslav Tichý on other photo blogs; in any event, he is a recluse from the Czech Republic, a trained artist, who in his old age has become better known for his furtive photography made with a home-made camera. His photographs are almost invariably images of women; as his [...]
Evolution or Devolution?
It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, Just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. Moreover, these two types of unconscious are intimately linked. For in most cases, the diverse aspects of reality captured by the .. camera lie outside only the normal spectrum of sense impressions. Walter Benjamin [...]