Blog About Photography

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So check this out because this is something Cosmic in its implications. Are you paying attention?

At this moment, I am sitting in the Butler Library on the American University campus, writing my midterm for a class I’m in on contemporary art. Or rather, I should say that I’m sitting here with my midterm open and books on the desk and reading photography blogs. That’s not what’s important though. What’s important is this.

My art history professor made a note on the top of the midterm that we are to use Arial (or Helvetica) at 11 point to take the midterm. Who knows why she stipulated this, probably because people write shit really small sometimes when they don’t know what they’re talking about. In any case, as you may have noticed, that’s my typeface of choice, and I, like the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority and man countless others, condense the letters. So, not wanting to be marked down for this, I made a little note on the top of my paper.

A small note before beginning. The condensed font is a common aesthetic choice regarding this typeface, not one made to save space on this particular assignment. I can’t stand looking at something I’ve written with massive gaps between the characters. Why, after crafting an argument, would I present it full of holes?

Yeah, ok, so I know that’s kind of weird, maybe a little pretentious or something to write this kind of thing a prof, but it’s what I do anyway and I didn’t want to be marked down for it. Plus I’m pretty sure she’d think it’s funny and maybe a little endearing. So that’s about as far as I’ve gotten in writing this paper, but then I found this, and I wasn’t even looking for it. Read the rest of this entry »

I just went through my Amazon Wishlist and removed all the things from it that I’ve picked up in the past couple of months, which was really satisfying. Of course, I want more stuff than I’ll probably ever actually have, but it was great getting to scratch a couple of things off.

There is not a photographic document out there that is more prescient to the current political era than Robert Polidori’s “After the Flood”. I don’t want to harp on that point too much, but this painstaking record of post-Katrina New Orleans resonates far beyond the reporting the destruction reaped on poor, black neighborhoods. Each photograph, of which there are hundreds, is meticulously rendered, yielding a serene, quite portrait of something horrible that can’t and won’t be forgiven.

Of all the people out there who aren’t photographers, Ed Ruscha is probably my favorite. He’s been in a couple of different shows I’ve seen with my Mother while visiting her in Houston last year, and so she gave his book, “Photographer” for my birthday. “I take pictures to do a job, which is to make a book,” Ruscha famously said in the 1960s when he was busy doing projects like Tweny-Six Gasoline Stations, his series of parking lots, or Every Building on the Sunset Strip. They’re all in this book, which is came out alongside his retrospective at the Whitney last year. What a guy.

I bought Alec Soth’s second book “Niagra” in a panic last week after I learned that his first, “Sleeping by the Mississippi” has gone out of print and is impossible to find for less than $350. Soth is one of the contemporary photographers I am most interested in, and I was horrified by the prospect of going without his books. Snatch up “Niagra” while you can If you don’t already have it, I’m sure it will be unavailable soon.

I was in Second Story Books last night, which is a great used bookstore here in DC, poking through the photography section. I go in there from time to time looking for cheap monographs, and I was so excited to see Stephen Shore’s “American Surfaces” sitting there on the shelf that I knocked a whole bunch of stuff down frantically trying to grab it. There was no need for this. There was no one else around.

I have one professor in particular who loves to assign reading from this, and I’ve read various photo-copied chunks of it in the past few years. I bought it used the other day, and one of these days, I’ll get around to reading it front to back. Who doesn’t love and respect Susan Sontag? Nobody. I feel having her books around makes me smarter by proxy, though it’s tempered by the fact that I can’t really stand Annie Leibovitz. But I guess that goes without saying.

I also just got Eggleston’s new book “5×7,” though it’s still sitting here in shrink wrap! I guess I want to open it kind of ceremoniously and then relish every single page.