One reason I feel free not to let any of this worry me is that I have no affiliations or allegiances within the poetry world, thus no image of myself as a poet of this or that tendency, nothing to maintain in anyone else’s eyes or my own except a level of quality to my output. […]
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This article, the first in a series of columns written for the Village Voice between 1968 and 1973, appeared exactly 50 years ago, in the June 20, 1968 issue of that alt-weekly newspaper, which had already become the model for the emerging national and, indeed, international “alternative press.” With it I hung out my shingle as a photography critic, a rubric that I thereby inaugurated and under which flag I still sail. […] “Octave of Prayer” represents a man, once a respected and vital teacher and philosopher in photography, coming to believe his own legend and making himself into an institution. This auto-deification is a sad and dangerous turn of events. […] In other words, boys and girls, that ain’t Aperture you’re holding, it’s a copy of The Watchtower, intended to make converts willing to follow a man who can simultaneously assert his own “natural talent for camera” and lack of egotism, who can claim, in so many words, that he and his followers are God’s gift to photography. […] |
 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.
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Time Capsule 1971: Collier’s Encyclopedia Yearbook
Two small items must be appended to this report. First, a Japanese newspaper announced that the waters near Mount Fuji were so polluted that one could develop photographs therein and get recognizable if fuzzy results. And the Allied Impex Corporation, after its success with this item last Christmas, announced that it was again planning to market its Mick-a-Matic — an Instamatic camera built into a large and colorful Mickey Mouse head — during the holiday season. […]