Between the years 1960-64 I cut my eyeteeth as a critic and cultural journalist by working on the Hunter College Arrow, the newspaper of Hunter College, City University of New York, while contributing poetry, short fiction, and a one-act play to the college’s literary magazine, the Echo. I did this while earning a B.A. in English Literature. In my senior year I edited the Arrow, preceded in that role by people like Paul Du Brul, Jack Newfield, Brian Sharoff, and Rita Dershowitz. Hunter College students in the Roosevelt House library, 1950s. Courtesy Hunter College. A reunion of those who worked on the Hunter Arrow in the 1950s and 1960s was held on Friday, May 7, 2010, at Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College, 47-49 E. 65th St., New York, NY. […]
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Roy DeCarava’s work itself — and what I might call the situation of that work in the field of photography when I came to it in the late 1960s — presented me with some important challenges as a writer about photography, and a chance to define in public some fundamental principles of my own project as a critic and historian. Few people understand what such an opportunity means to a critic, and how rarely it comes along. […] Michael Rosen first published his book Vanilla Sex: Explicit Fine Art Photographs as a free PDF download. Rosen invited me to write the introduction to this project. My essay turned into a meditation not only on his work but on the state of sexually explicit photography in our culture — a subject to which I’ve turned my attention frequently over the decades. That PDF recently passed its 10,000-download mark, which strikes me as remarkable success for a self-published project on such a controversial subject. Now Rosen has published a printed version of the book, via Blurb.com. . . . […] In early 2007 one of my local institutions, the Staten Island Museum, commissioned me to respond in writing to a set of 49 photographs drawn from its extensive collection. The group consists of Island scenes depicted in lantern slides, commercially produced postcards, amateur photographs, professionally made group portraits, film stills, and assorted other forms. […] |
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Thoughts on the Freelance Life
The publication of such a glib, superficial and ill-considered “psychoanalytic” attack on freelance activity beneath a sensationalized headline was obviously intended as a provocative act; I found myself impelled to respond. A great many of my professional colleagues and close friends — artists, writers, photographers and others — have chosen to exist in what this remarkable diagnosis so condescendingly calls a “lowly status,” and they don’t strike me as inherently any more neurotic than the average late-twentieth-century American. […]