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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. […]

Rendering Unto (Irene) Caesar

Irene Caesar, engrossed in her process, seems entirely oblivious to my discomfort, even when, quietly, I give verbal indications thereof. Crouching, kneeling, sometimes squatting on a soft-sided suitcase of mine, she appears to have entered a trance state in which she channels the spirit of David Hemmings in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up. Squirming around to adjust her vantage point, she calls out, repeatedly, “Give it to me! Give to to me! Show me your eroticism!” […]

Election 2016: Image World (4)

I skipped the the first nine Republic Party debates. They have scheduled a stupefying total of twelve; from what I’ve glimpsed, if projected in order as an endless loop they could make good on Donald Trump’s threat, if elected, to go “beyond waterboarding” in the “War on Terror.” […]