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Photo Ed: Awaiting the Millennium, 1 (1989)

Certainly photography teachers have done much to develop public awareness of the medium’s history and its influence on our culture. We have also successfully established and elevated those standards of craft which are the gauges for all who work in the medium. Nor have those been our only accomplishments. We have entrenched ourselves firmly — perhaps irrevocably — in the groves of academe. And we have, in record time, glutted the market for art photographs, for career art photographers and for teachers of art photography. […]

AIPAD 2016

You can view AIPAD as a (mostly) non-verbal version of the book that Benjamin planned to produce, comprised entirely of quotations from other sources. Benjamin structured his “Arcades Project” — first conceived in 1927 and unfinished when he died in 1940 — after the glass-roofed shopping malls of 19th-century Paris, epitomizing that “commodification of things” which he saw as the defining characteristic of modernity. […]

Spring Fever 2016: Bits & Pieces (1)

In “Virginibus Puerisque” (1881), Robert Louis Stevenson noted that “Enthusiasm about art is become a function of the average female being, which she performs with precision and a sort of haunting sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-regulated machine.” In the emerging android era we won’t need what Tom Wolfe dubbed the “culture buds” to perform this task; there’s an automaton for that. […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa on D-Day (28)

[Note, March 14, 2016: This post, originally published on March 13, contains the first serious error made in the course of this investigation to date: I mistook footage of the battle of Dieppe, August 19, 1942, for footage of D-Day almost two years later. Carelessness on my part, for which I offer no excuse, only […]

Guest Post 22: Doreen Landry Millichip on Bob Landry (b)

It is now about 57 years since Bob admitted to me that he had “taken a swing” at the guy [John Morris], so I am really hazy about this. Bob never went into details and although this loss [of his D-Day film] was obviously an event he would never forget, his philosophy was that “Life is too short to hate anyone or bear a grudge.” […]