poetry | photography | philosophy
Nothing is done automatically through photography. Good photographs differentiate themselves from all the rest of any other sort principally by being informative – interesting: not boring. It is difficult (if not downright impossible) to take a bad photograph seeing all means are provided, and all means function (quasi-?) automatically. (And in the quagmire of uninformative…
Read More
Without separation, no contact. Separation is the necessary precursor to contact. It is irrelevant whether a painted thing is a being or a non-being. Painting confirms the painted thing as being as such. The lemon is the lemon. There is nothing outside the lemon which is the lemon. Obviously lemons can cease to exist. In…
Read More
Picture yourself in an art gallery eyeing the mysterious beauty of some post-modern painterly disaster hanging on one of the gallery walls. Conceive now the world you are standing in, the very same world that holds in its bosom those atrocious paintings hanging on the gallery walls, as one unitary painterly mess. Yourself now, as Pantocrator,…
Read More
Man does not seek knowledge; he covers it. For the Ancient Greeks, the gods were not to be questioned. Later, the Christians would adopt the convenient ethical stance of refraining from questioning themselves. With the advent of photography, reality was not to be questioned further. The contradictory dogmas that attached themselves to each of these…
Read More
It is superfluous, in light of the present Zeitgeist, to stay arguing on whether error is or is not a strictly human phenomenon. Error, defined as “a wandering, straying, a going astray” (HARPER 2001-2021), error, therefore, whose meaning hinges on metaphorical borrowings from human actions, is necessarily to be understood as a strictly human phenomenon.…
Read More
Stanley Cavell is quoted as saying: “Photography overcame subjectivity in a way undreamed of by painting, one which does not so much defeat the act of painting as escape it altogether: by automatism, by removing the human agent from the act of reproduction” (in SNYDER and ALLEN 1975: 145). Yes, yet another trite comment about…
Read More