This year I found it necessary to fire a client, declining to undertake a second rewrite of a commissioned photo-book introduction. Both the editor and the photographer insisted that I refrain from discussing at any length the socially and politically charged subject matter of the pictures, demanding instead that I address the images purely in formalist terms, preferably by making comparisons to great painters of the past. […]
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On August 1, 2009, Anna’s birthday and Melville’s too, I got to read the role of Starbuck in OutLOUD’s yearly rendering of Moby Dick, with Anna present in the audience for the first time, and to dedicate my share of the program to her. As I did, I held in my mind that image of her as a precocious girlchild, sneaking under the locked gate to read this book in Chinese and hearing it now for the first time in English, read by her husband. I felt part of some great circle of connectedness. […] I haven’t seen the new romantic comedy featuring Drew Barrymore and Justin Long, Going the Distance. However, as it happens, I’ve spent some time working on the treatment of a script that’s even more far-fetched, so to speak, hoping that Hollywood’s ready for it. […] 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. […] |
 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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Dog Day Afternoons: Bits & Pieces (3)
Late last year I gave a talk in London, “Dinosaur Bones: The End (and Ends) of Photo Criticism,” in which, among other things, I bemoaned the fact that the newspaper and magazine industry has begun to replace specialized critics grounded in the visual arts (like me) with “cultural journalists,” generalists with no depth of […]