What I can’t do in this blog is create the reputable, influential, multi-author, multi-subject periodical in which my writing on photography coexists with and gets contextualized by writings on different subjects from a flock of equally informed others, as it once did. That’s a publishing enterprise far beyond my scope, requiring pockets much deeper than mine and an editorial/managerial skill set I just don’t have. […]
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Follow me on Mastodon:
@adcoleman@hcommons.social
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Our repetitions and replications (Internet echo, photographs and otherwise) are crucial to pass on cultural practice and serve an important social function—even if on the face of it our actions appear, not only infinitely stupid, but repetitive, a bit outrageous, counterintuitive to logic, may serve no obvious purpose or may even hijack what A. D. Coleman and I both thought might be a productive thread. Our dumbness may kill us, or it may save us. The jury is still out. […] The Internet in many ways and on many levels promises freedom when, in fact, it can deliver quite the opposite. Its multitudinous and disparate voices can give us all ADD. Walls around institutions have become nearly impenetrable, if only for the sake of the sanity of those within. Discussions remain fragmented and remain, not for lack of intent or purpose, within closed communities. Conversation is encouraged and simultaneously (intentionally and unintentionally) degraded and elevated via the form of its dispersion and by the practice of its participants. […] I gather that you aspire to becoming a working photography critic — which might mean that you would piece together a revenue stream from some different activities, as I have (some writing, some teaching, some lecturing, some curating perhaps), but that you’d get paid for all of them, including the writing. In which case the writing would be done vocationally, not avocationally, meaning that you’d take it on as part of your daily job, not as a hobby or sideline. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014All content of this publication is © copyright 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 by A. D. Coleman unless otherwise noted. All materials contained on this site are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced for commercial purposes without prior written permission. All photos copyright by the individual photographers. "Fair use" allows quotation of excerpts of textual material from this site for educational and other noncommercial purposes.
Published by Flying Dragon LLC.
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Lt. John Pike Goes Viral (6)
I’ve tracked the “pepper-spray copy” story here at Photocritic International because it’s as vivid and immediate an example of the potency of citizen journalism via the lens media as a commentator on lens culture like myself could want. I’ve said, from the beginning, that without Lt. John Pike’s bring-it-on turning of this situation into a police-brutality photo op in front of a crowd of amateur paparazzi, heads would not have started to roll at UC Davis and he would not have become an international symbol of uniformed thuggery. […]