05 Scenes From a Walk

04 Kiss the Police?

Vinca Peterson: Raves and Riots

… this photograph is striking… it seems that young women confronting the uniformed presence of the state with love is an image to be found happening again and again… it reminds me of this photograph from the Vietnam War era…

Marc Ribaud, Jan Rose Kasmir confronting the military at the Pentagon.

… i wonder if the striking contradiction of the feminine confronting the masculine in this way can happen with the same impact now that women increasingly join the ranks of the police and military?…

03 Love is Love

… Loving: A Photographic History of Men In Love, 1850-1950…

… one remarkable thing about this collection is the courage of the men being photographed… the world was far less enlightened than it is now, though there is still a long way to go… it reminds me of one of Simone de Beauvoir’s achievements in The Second Sex, which was to establish that gender and sex are not the same thing, the former being a social construct, the latter being a condition of the body… gender is fluid, sex, less so…

07 Reflections

From earlier today…

… my vacation reading material…

… have been reading most things i can get my hands on about women and photography… all aspects… women as subjects(objects), photographers, critics, historians… this book is an anthology of writings on photography by women… the last few essays have been interesting looks at the role of photography in conflict, politics and empire building… one in particular written by Gen Doy on the Paris Communeat the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian war seems to channel some aspects of current political and economic forces at play…

… scenes from a walk…

Many French artisans were forced to join thenranks of the proletariat which, in the early days of industrialization, meant a life of misery and complete political insignificance. The petite bourgeoisie, or lower middle classes, also became more numerous, but with the expansion of industry and commerce they prospered along with the rest of the bourgeoisie, whose members were fast becoming the pillars of the social order.¹_  … i am reading about the industrial revolution in France, the social shifts resulting from it, and wonder, are we experiencing something similar, now, the advance of information technology, robotics, the demise of many forms of work, the new ways of organizing the flow of goods and services… could it be that unfettered exchange on social media and the damage it easily leads to is a weakness of democracies?… is the new social order the rise of a techno elite and a large quantity of irrelevant (except to themselves) humans?…

… discovered a new photo editing app… i continue to work to streamline my photo work flow and center it on the iPhone camera… Darkroom is promising…

… i have been trying to leave photographs in color, but i am not satisfied for long… black and white seems to appeal way more than color… i am trying to figure out what it is that makes it so appealing to me… there is an instant nostalgia, there was a time when B&W was almost all you could do for a photograph, but there is color nostalgia too, the way a certain film, now filter, impacts the perception of a photograph… perhaps to me, B&W is an acknowledgement that this isn’t the real thing, not even a facsimile of the present thing… the second an image is made its own moment and the moment of the subject begins receding into the past… i was once accused of being a romantic, maybe B&W fits with my so called romantic point of view… then i think, color could do that too…

… there are photographers i am aware of and admire that only make B&W photographs, Robert Adams, Gerry Johansson… they are an older generation of photographers… they don’t make pictures of people very much… landscapes, streetscapes, mostly… me too… largely i am too shy to photograph people, it makes me uncomfortable, i stick to the evidence of people…

… a walk to the North Lighthouse this morning… a slow going trek around a crescent beach of loose sand and rocks… small steps most of the way…

… some shots from this morning’s walk…

03 My Photography:

Flattened Cans…

I have been collecting images of flattened cans for a number of years. They represent uniqueness out of homogeneity to me. They start as cohorts (particular brand, particular size) of perfectly shaped and, for all intents and purposes, identical industrial objects. When tossed into the environment (sadly, there is no end of subject material) they continue the entropic process of becoming unique and beautiful objects.

Every country’s past is contested to some extent. But there might be no country as extreme as Germany. To begin with, there is history that is largely uncontestable: World War 2 and especially the Holocaust. I added “largely” in that sentence because the contesting does happen, albeit at a different level (for example, members of the neo-fascist AfD party have been talking it down, claiming it doesn’t matter as much in the context of German history as a whole). But the basic facts stand, and denial of the Holocaust is a criminal offense.¹

… as i read this, it is not possible to avoid thoughts of all the denial of January 06, 2021 that is going on by right wingers… the idea of such denial being illegal is appealing… perhaps there ought to be laws that make lying to further fraudulent or destructive aims in public forums of any kind illegal… i don’t think speech should be free if it’s demonstrably false and destructive…

… JC is reviewing Ruckshaufehler by Eiko Grimberg… the book is dedicated to the symbology of the German State… it sounds like an effective critique of where things stand… nationalist/fascist sentiments are on the rise… attempts are being made to minimize the Holocaust… if it weren’t illegal to do so, there would of course be denial that it happened…

… human beings are an ugly species… the so-called rational mind has given us the capacity for duplicity and, i might argue, little more…

… JC gives the book a highly recommended thumb up…

… I look for a place to possibly purchase, i find this article by Brad Feuerhelm, who gives it his highest recommendation…

… the article attracts my attention, and this image is what pulls me in…

… it’s an image i would make, lots of people might make, and for that reason, becomes a touchstone of common experience between me and the photographer, who is queer and prefers they, them, their as pronoun…

… when i type the name Elle, i have a fleeting memory of an Alvin Ailey dance class on Time Square… i was trying to teach a young woman a dance movement we had learned in class… she was beautiful, her name was Elle… it wasn’t till later that i became aware of Elle, the model, and i was never quite sure if she were that Elle… it’s possible i taught Elle a modern dance move… we parted on the street outside the building where the dance class had taken place… i remember her fumbling to pull a cigarette out of her bag then out of a box… we parted… i never saw her again…

… there is something very attractive about this work… something honest, particular and universal both… deploying seascapes and landscapes to mediate between their experience and the experience of others… something brilliant about it…

…seen along the way…

… an article on the sensual photography of men and sculptures of men by Magnum photographer Herbert List… i am not into the depiction of the male body sexually, so i view the images with a certain detachment that i don’t have when viewing depictions of female bodies, where viewing is always sexually charged… List photographed during the Second World War… he had little opportunity to exhibit or publish during his lifetime… looking at the images, i imagines him traveling through the Greek Isles and surrounding himself with youthful, heavenly bodies wherever he went…

…photographs by Peter Hujar and Moyra Davey… review by Jorg Colberg… i have seen a number of reviews of this book, all of them good…

Jena Westra, from Afternoons

… Brad Feuerhelm gives this book a highest recommendation, stating that it is as near perfect a photobook as could be… i recognize the name of the artist which makes it likely i’ve run across the work before…

In the case Jenna Westra’s Afternoons (Hassla, 2020), several factors within the book suggest a return to the body as an act less of political dialogue, but more as an act of balance. Westra employs gesture and a number of interesting sculptural tactics to create a world where the feminine is embraced without men involved at all and unlike Girl Pictures, the emphasis is not on fantasy, but on reality, collaboration, and intimacy.¹

… the book is about the shape and form of women… young women… it feeds my rabbit hole… i ordered it…

… from yesterday stands out in my mind…

… the reflection in the discarded storm door of the house(s) across the street is wonderful… a kind of ghost presence…

… very nicely composed photographs, about place, anchored by a river…

Dan Wood?

… the article attributes the photographs to Mike Gaynor(?) in their captions, but the book, and one believes, photographs are decidedly by Dan Wood?… confusion… i don’t know that there is anything exceptional about the book other than very well made photographs… there are many books about place anchored by a flowing body of water, Sleeping By the Mississippi comes to mind…

Kristina Shakht, To Be Or To Become

… an article, This Zine Celebrates the Female Body in its “Raw and Authentic” form… the artist is a survivor of sexual assault i am told… she has made a zine representing how women see themselves i am told… the photographs are various, women, some flowers, some landscapes, the women in various states of undress and exposure… the lead-in photograph is of a young woman, naked, crawling across gravel, she is thin, angular, almost childlike… one feels the pain of gravel on knees… i suppose it is raw and authentic if one thinks that nudity is raw and authentic… i find it mostly engages my male gaze… that is, it is mostly sexual… the images are well made, artistic…

_ “(The zine explores the) modern-day female experience: the way we feel ourselves, the way we move, think, and live that’s beyond sexuality and being sexual. I wanted to show that naked body doesn’t mean sexual, that it can be just body._¹

… i would like to see the Zine itself, but i discover it is being issued in a very limited and very expensive format… book formats and zines in particular are not generally meant to be so pricey, a larger audience is being courted, usually…

… i am left with the images in the article, which mostly seem to objectify the women… that is my older white male take…