… as in, we haven’t seen from her before… this work is up my alley, no people, just the evidence of people, lots of landscapes scarred by the activities of people… i am not really inspired, but one image is significant to me…

Hannah Taylor

… i have a thing about Christian cross symbolism and utility wires… my images are not about actual Christian crosses in the landscape, but utility poles, which often mimic Christian crosses, and the wires they carry, which bring power and communication to the masses… there is something for me about the connection of communication and symbols of Christianity… haven’t totally put my finger on it, but i collect images that think about it…

… which means there is a bigger investigation going on… this article makes it sound as though it is more about corruption in the prison management system, but the conspiracy theory in most of us would wonder if something more significant is afoot…

… the threat of authoritarianism is global… this article discusses the possibilities in Italy and points to similar rising threats in France and Spain… have the consequences of hard-right nationalism during the 1930’s and 40’s been forgotten?…

… last night i posted on FB that i wasn’t sure what to make of the food insecure arriving at a food distribution center in a Lexus… i saw two of them in line for food this past Wednesday… i saw other cars that, while not considered luxury cars, were new and expensive… in general, it seemed that most in line had relatively new cars… i am not judging here, just trying to understand… are so many people always just a calamity away from being on food lines, outward appearances not withstanding?… do we make car ownership too easy?… do we too easily fling ourselves into debt to live the “good” life, the American Dream?… i’m sure it is more complicated than it looks…

… trying to figure out the order of the day… we should leave for J’s by 10 AM, need to pick up BP meds before, something for desert… i am glad we are seeing J and her new home…

… woke up in the middle of the night, strangely uncomfortable, almost in all over pain, but not quite… eventually, it went away and i went back to sleep…

… Brad Feuerhelm tells us he is a pioneer in the use of color photography, not completely groundbreaking, but with significant accomplishments…

Being first or the most original is not everything. I can say with 100% conviction that though Helmer-Petersen may not have been the first artist to invoke a particular affinity to konkrete Photographie, Deformations (After Penn) geometric abstraction, or silhouetting as found in many of his sub-interests, I can say that his execution of these subjects was masterful.¹

… this need to break new ground, to be masterfully breaking new ground, what is it?… isn’t it enough to be a master of the ground you stand on?…

… these sentences catch my attention…

Largely due to the lack of economy afforded to artists working in photography at the time, unpaid work could largely be de-manacled from its relationship to the market. As the market would not develop in American until the late 1970s, this allowed artist working with the medium in the first half of the twentieth century a freedom to create bodies of work which existed independently from one another. The artists were not expected to form a career from highly stylized and easily recognizable features thus making experimentation a pursuit that would be rewarded with approval from one’s colleagues over the pressures of the gallery to perform sequential hits. The downside of course is that one’s life in photography may continue on forever unobserved outside of intimate circles.²

Elisabeth Van Vyve, Untitled, 1993–2013

© Clément Van Vyve/Collection Bruno Decharme

… Photo Brut: Collection Bruno Decharme & Compagnie at the American Museum of Folk Art, New York City…

_The artist I kept returning to in the show, time and again, is its most spartan and tranquil, an outlier in an assembly of often cacophonous outliers. Elisabeth Van Vyve, a woman with autism and hearing problems who now lives in a retirement home in Antwerp, has used disposable color-film cameras for decades to catalogue her circumscribed visual environment in obsessive detail, creating albums of thousands of snapshots that inevitably evoke the postmodern banal-sublime of William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, and early Fischli & Weiss.¹

… i read that the Biden/Harris administration is under pressure to do something to alleviate the worldwide microchip shortage… the shortage is impacting the availability and pricing of consumer goods dependent on them and idling workers in manufacturing facilities, “complicating” economic recovery… read more here.

… i am wondering if i should get that new iPhone now?…

Middlebury College economist Caitlin Knowles Myers projects that overturning Roe might reduce the annual number of abortions by about 14 percent. “A post-Roe United States isn’t one in which abortion isn’t legal at all,” Myers told The New York Times. “It’s one in which there’s tremendous inequality in abortion access.”¹

… having just been thinking about atrocities and the atrocious, i encounter this article and wonder, why are these “atrocities” so important to stop, and others not?… the same Christians so adamant about abortion are pro Israel in spite of its atrocious treatment of Palestinians… the same Christians many decades ago lynched black men and women(?)… there is something unique about the unborn child?… i suspect it is a useful political issue for rallying the faithful as well as a means of oppression of women, especially women of color…

… pro choice advocates are resigning themselves to further restriction of abortion after the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case out of Mississippi…

… we are not logical animals… we are primal and political animals… the ability to reason only means we can work out a defense for atrocities and the atrocious…

… Sontag sums up the chapter by reminding us the presentation of history is selective… we have reached a moment in which a large number of our citizens are ready to look at the horrors of slavery and its aftermath, but what about the many other atrocities committed in our name by our government?…

A museum devoted to the history of America’s wars that included the vicious war the United States fought against guerrillas in the Philippines from 1899 to 1902 (expertly excoriated by Mark Twain), and that fairly presented the arguments for and against using the atomic bomb in 1945 on the Japanese cities, with photographic evidence that showed what those weapons did, would be regarded—now more than ever—as a most unpatriotic endeavor.¹

… Sontag talks about the “usefulness” of images of atrocities exhibited long after the atrocious can be punished for being atrocious… the example is a set of photographs of lynchings in the south, taken as souvenirs… why show them in the year 2000 when they were made 1890-1930?… what are we supposed to do with the information, with the consciousness they raise?…

The pictures were taken as souvenirs and made, some of them, into postcards; more than a few show grinning spectators, good churchgoing citizens as most of them had to be, posing for a camera with the backdrop of a naked, charred, mutilated body hanging from a tree. The display of these pictures makes us spectators, too.¹

… will black and brown people be treated better now because we see these images now?, will we recognize just what brutes we are?, i am guessing that most who saw the exhibit or the book, Without Sanctuary, think of themselves as brutes, yet…

It was further argued that submitting to the ordeal should help us understand such atrocities not as the acts of “barbarians” but as the reflection of a belief system, racism, that by defining one people as less human than another legitimates torture and murder. But maybe they were barbarians. Maybe this is what most barbarians look like. (They look like everybody else.)²

… this is what gives me pause at our present moment in history, brutes are on the move, and they are us…

… Sontag talking about the limited ability of a photograph to tell a story, to deliver understanding… they can shock, they can be pivotal moments for public opinion, but they don’t say much about the moments leading up to the moment in question… they define, but don’t explain… words, she tells us, explain…

… several thought streams in my brain…

… yesterday i ordered a b-day gift for J… part of me didn’t want to… such a weird dynamic…

… this AM a post or two by S about their life which is happier these days with G in it… lightning has struck them twice… i hope we get to meet G…

… it struck me that i like posting to Micro.blog, even though so few people get to see it… much of the same content could be posted to FB, but i don’t like posting there… i don’t like having adds and aesthetics forced on me… i don’t like that they harvest data, i don’t like much of it… so, i prefer obscurity with control… that seems to be the choice these days, obscurity with control, community on corporate terms…

… the loud bird just started cranking up… i don’t know what sort of bird it is… i imagine it large and bold, but it could easily be tiny… all i know of it is its very loud sing-song voice…

… wondering if we will have any of the 17 year cicada cohort around here… so far, no signs of it… i will be disappointed if we don’t… i remember the last major cohort, there was more of it to the north…

… i have been looking for ways to use rhubarb as a savory ingredient… i am not big on deserts because i am on the edge of pre-diabetes and because i can think of many ways i would rather consume the excess calories (hello cheese course!)… last night i made a rhubarb and spinach salad which called for poaching the quince and reducing the poaching liquid to make a dressing for the salad… the dressing was delicious, the rhubarb mushy… tonight i did a salad that called for pickling the rhubarb and using the pickle juice as part of the dressing… i much preferred the pickled rhubarb which softened a little but largely retained shape and crunch while gaining sweet-tart flavorings… it was combined with lovage (in lieu of celery) and fennel… i think celery would have been a little better… lovage is a strong flavor which overwhelmed the fennel… however, i think rhubarb and lovage would be lovely by themselves…

… Pocket Road trail today… the climb is relatively easy, two stops to let my heart slow down, my health app tells me i have climbed the equivalent of 33 flights of stairs…

… the trees are well leafed out and it is dark at some points along the trail… the sounds of water as it flows over, around, under rocks… this stream of water comes from the reservoir up above… i am sitting about half way up, at the point where the trail crosses the stream, my stopping point most of the time… this is what is in front of me…

… i feel the happiness of a body that has exercised itself to the point of endorphin rush, satisfied that i can do it with relative ease… happy to be in the woods with only the sounds of the stream, birds, insects… so calming…

… turning attention to my own work, i am in the process of reorganizing my creative productive stream, this new blog is part of that effort, i have decided to separate what i write about from what i photograph so that one site is about my photography and the other site is about everything else… the image above is one image from attention paid in May… check out more here… more added to the end of the month… here is another…

… and…

… and…

… and…

… and…

_“The personal is political” was the slogan of second wave feminism. In this deftly interwoven exhibit, curator Karen Haas features photographers working 1965-1985 from Canada to Latin America in a demonstration of how women’s personal lives were inextricably linked to cultural and political inequalities. The provocations and inspirations of the Civil and Equal Rights movements share many qualities with our current #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements. “Personal and Political” sheds light on a vibrant historical narrative, offering a perspective that brings our own times into sharper focus.¹

… this article reviews an exhibit at The Museum of Fine Art, Boston, featuring women photographers active during the years 1965-1985… i would definitely go see the exhibition if i were in Boston, even if women in photography weren’t my personal rabbit hole… some great images in the show, here are a couple…

“Patti Smith, New Orleans” Annie Leibovitz (American, born in 1949) 1978. Photograph, chromogenic print Gift of Jan Colombi and Jay Reeg Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

“Bathroom Surveillance, or Vanity Eye” Martha Rosler (American, born in 1943) 1966–1972. Photograph, inkjet print (photomontage)

Museum purchase with funds donated by Scott Offen Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

… the game i most loved to play, even if not the game i was most competitively successful at (that would be soccer, which i was able to play competitively through college)… this article talks about Common Practice: Basketball & Contemporary Art

Firemen put out blaze while youths play basketball by Paul Hosefros for The New York Times, 1975

_“Basketball is a universal language, much like art is. There are other sports that are likely more popular, but none are as influential as basketball from a cultural standpoint,” says artist and filmmaker John Dennis. “It transcends barriers in music, fashion, art, and pop culture, and also draws attention to pressing issues in the social and political arena.”¹

… the birds nesting in the eves of our house became active some time ago, at the first hint of daylight… right now, the garbage truck is banging, whirring and whining down the street…

Central to modern expectations, and modern ethical feeling, is the conviction that war is an aberration, if an unstoppable one. That peace is the norm, if an unattainable one. This, of course, is not the way war has been regarded throughout history. War has been the norm and peace the exception.¹

… my entire life has been spent in a land that has been largely free of war… i am white, male, middle class, in my 60’s… relative peace and calm has been a luxury throughout my life… military conscription ended when i was old enough, there has been no war since that demanded such conscription… because i am white, the violence of the justice system does not impact me… it is impossible for me to truly comprehend the privilege i have been graced with…

That a gory battlescape could be beautiful—in the sublime or awesome or tragic register of the beautiful—is a commonplace about images of war made by artists. The idea does not sit well when applied to images taken by cameras: to find beauty in war photographs seems heartless. But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.²

… people should not detach themselves from their feelings about misfortune and tragedy, theirs or others… the universe is indifferent to it, but people are not always… the closer to home, the more certain it is they won’t be… where is one to find meaning in a universe that churns on, constructing, deconstructing, building up, grinding down… is the best stance one of detachment?… if it is, then what of the human capacity to feel, love, empathize… there is a great emphasis being placed on empathy these days, it is a hopeful stance, one that suggests that we can all just get along… and yet, the evidence is solid in the direction of no, we can’t…

… Sontag talks about photographs taken among the ruins of the trade towers… what is beauty?… does it exist in devastation and death?… the discussion is about the confused powers of photography, the power to document, the power to make most anything beautiful, the position of witness to the truths of the cosmos, sublime and detestable both…

… as example of raising misfortune to artistic aesthetic heights, which crosses over from documentation to exploitation, Sontag offers Sebastião Salgado, who photographs wild animals on the brink of extinction, humans engaged in barely endurable labor that pays a pittance, or roaming the world restively looking for a place to live out their lives with decent prospects for the privilege i have… she notes that his pictures are exhibited in high end galleries and purchased by people with far more means than i have… they are noble savage sorts of photographs… the savage is beautiful so long as they remain the savage… she note also that the people he photographs never have a name… or at least, he hasn’t troubled himself with finding out what it is and identifying them…

_ PHOTOGRAPHS OBJECTIFY: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed. And photographs are a species of alchemy, for all that they are prized as a transparent account of reality._³

… photographic fact of life… Sontag talks of the current trend to show the shockingly ugly, to provoke emotion, action, or simply catapult the creator into notoriety… this latter is the operating motive of so much these days, to be noticed at all one has to shock… a shock doctrine… as i write this i know i have heard it before and look it up, the title of a book by Naomi Klein where she describes it as the deliberate exploitation of national calamity to put through dubious policies while the people are distracted… hmmm…

All memory is individual, unreproducible—it dies with each person. What is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened, with the pictures that lock the story in our minds. Ideologies create substantiating archives of images, representative images, which encapsulate common ideas of significance and trigger predictable thoughts, feelings.⁴

… an extremely important point…

… Sontag discusses the significance to a people of collecting their history and enshrining it in an institutional setting so they can remember the tragic past and celebrate survival in the present… Sontag asks why there is no museum of the sufferings of African Americans (at the time of writing, there are now a number that are in planning or opened as of the writing of this Atlantic article in 2016)…

… this quote is highlighted 273 times in my Kindle edition book…

The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying.¹

… Sontag concludes the chapter discussing the racist nature of photographs of the dead and dying in African and Asian countries… a collective fascination with the less fortunate as a means to confirm the good fortune of not living in one of “those” countries… human beings are very good at othering… one questions the adaptive advantage, isn’t there something wrong with nature’s programming here?… is getting one’s genes into the next generation so important?… at this point i confront the reality that, as far as i know, i have not projected my genes into the next generation, a fact that at times leaves me feeling a failure…

… still waking up… taking seconds to connect the thought of doing to actually doing it…

… began to rearrange my photography website… not sure i like what i did but will keep going until it makes sense…

… dogs restless, got me up early… Fiona smelled something outside in the back yard i think… i finally got out of bed at 3:30…

… looking at the weather, there is very little rain in the forecast… my next thought is how expensive watering the garden is…

… Heather Cox Richardson wrote about the Republican refusal to get behind a bi-partisan commission to figure out what happened on January 6, 2021… the thinking is that some of them will have to testify to things they would rather not testify to…

… the noose is closing in on 45… the NYS AG announced that the investigation is now into criminal wrong doing, suggesting that there are some smoking guns…

… how often will we be incredulous over Republican rejection of Democracy?… Democracy is not in their best interest so long as they remain the party of aggrieved white men and women… question is, do Democrats have the balls to do what is needed to stop them?…

… i take the road through Memorial Park… it is Wednesday, food bank day… there are so many cars in line…

… sadness again drifts through me… even in an improving economy, so many need food… i am surprised by the two Lexus cars i see in line, and that so many of the cars are in good to practically new condition… i don’t expect poverty to arrive in a Lexus, i expect poverty to arrive in cars that are ready for the junk yard… i am not sure what to think…

… in the park, a person is asleep on the ground, back turned towards me, a dog rests its chin on their hip… a wave of sad comes over me… homeless?, transient?… the dog looks well cared for… i hope there is a house that welcomes them somewhere…

… a squirrel chases another squirrel, territorial squabbles?…