Those core issues — the brevity of life, the spiral of time, the constancy of change, the cyclic aspects of history and human experience, and the enduring, unbreakable connection between humans and the natural world — weave constantly through Martha Madigan’s commentary on her own work and working method, and make themselves apparent in the work itself. […]
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Martha Madigan has worked almost exclusively with the photogram for the past three decades, patiently building up an extensive, interconnected body of work that has evolved into one of the most coherent and durable considerations of the photogram in the medium’s history. […] Errol Morris’s position is, I think, quite clearly against the idea that the Burroughs family owned an alarm clock. He does not accept his own third option as credible, any more than James Curtis does. How on earth both Morris and Curtis managed to convince themselves of this, against all the efforts of Occam’s Razor, is something of a mystery itself. Nevertheless, the situation is even worse than that. […] I can think of no other postmodern-era project that has at once paid such homage to Walter Benjamin while at the same time so thoroughly refuting him — by making a convincing argument that even digitally rendered, mechanically generated facsimiles of mass-produced artifacts can effectively contain and transmit the experience he called “aura.” […] A photographic image is a transformation of reality; when selected with consciousness and an intention beyond the recording of surface, it is inevitably a remaking of an event into the photographer’s own image, and thus an assumption of godhead. […] |
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