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Misreading Eggleston
I was a shut-in all weekend, desperately trying to finish the slideshow for my book tour, and missed the entirety of the first annual New York Photo Festival. Smart move or what? So I relied on The Jackanory for snappy coverage of all the razzmatazz. Now comes Robert Wright with a smart take on Various Photographs, one the four main shows at the festival, curated by Tim Barber.
So I am back to [Tim] Barber. His show [Various Photographs] demonstrates what we have done with the legacy of Eggleston’s Democratic Forest. We have been concerned with people up trees. And the mundane, and the ephemeral, but I don’t think we have absorbed, or maybe we have abandoned the lessons of Eggleston which is to make pictures democratically, not “of everything” but of everything equally. In other words, photography is not about “the subject.” It is about the total, the picture, the picture “problem.” It is people AND trees if that is your bag.
Why do I think Various Photographs is problematic?
It adopts the view that authorship is incidental, that photography can be characterized as collecting, and that you can photograph “anything.”
It is the reverse: authorship is everything, photography is not collecting and it is not about photographing “anything,” it is about treating everything in the photograph as equal.
Posted on May 21, 2008, in Art Stuff.
Preventive War: Heresey of the Marxists
From C. Vann Woodward's essay "The Irony of Southern History," published in 1953.
In this portion of his essay, Woodward is discussing Reinhold Niebuhr's book The Irony of American History: "In clinging to our infant illusions of innocence along with new power, writes [Niebuhr], we are 'involved in the ironic perils which compound the experiences of Babylon and Israel' — the perils of overweening power and overweening virtue. "
Woodward continues:
There are many perils, both for our nation and for the world, inherent in this situation — and they do not all come from abroad. We are exasperated by the ironic incongruities of our position. Having more power than ever before, America ironically enjoys less security than in the days of our weakness. Convinced of her virtue, she finds that even her allies accuse her of domestic vices invented by her enemies. The liberated prove ungrateful for their liberation, the reconstructed for their reconstruction, and the late colonial peoples vent their resentment upon our nation — the most innocent, we believe, of the imperial powers. Driven by these provocations and frustrations, there is the danger that America may be tempted to exert all the terrible power she possesses to compel history to conform to her own illusions. The extreme, but no means the only expression, would be the so-called preventive war. The would be to commit the worst heresy of the Marxists, with whom it is dogma that they can compel history to the pattern of their dreams by the ruthless use of force.
"The Irony of Southern History" appears in Woodward's collection The Burden of Southern History.
Posted on May 19, 2008, in Notebook.
Breach of Peace: The Tour
The Breach of Peace Book Tour debuts at the Smithsonian in DC this Thursday. Appearing will be Freedom Riders John Lewis and Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, Roger Wilkins, who wrote a terrific introduction to the book, and me. The event starts at 6:45 at the S. Dillon Ripley Center on the Mall. Buy tickets and get more details.
Next stop is Symphony Space in NYC on May 28. Appearing will be Freedom Riders Joan Pleune, Hezekiah Watkins and Albert Gordon, and me. Starts at 7:30 PM. Buy tickets and get more details.
The rest of the book tour dates are here.
Posted on May 19, 2008, in Mississippi.
links for 2008-05-10
Posted on May 09, 2008, in Delicious links.