Joseph hints at a gentler way of describing Arbus’s practice and, by extension, Joseph’s broadest poetic intention. She asks: “How do we talk to one another from the sanctuary of our own solitudes?”
Category: Head
The category, Head, is for posts that make us think.
A man hit his dog on the head
A gifted storyteller wrote: A man hit his dog on the head. At first, I took this to be the finest story I had ever read. Concise and spare, it did precisely what a good story should do: it created a space into which I could make an imaginative leap.
Upstate, by James Wood
Upstate concerns an aging property developer from Northumberland and his relationship with his two adult daughters.
Open City by Teju Cole
Ostensibly, Open City is the narrative of Julius, a young doctor completing his psychiatric residency at a Manhattan hospital. He is of mixed race which gives him the advantage of a certain flexibility (he straddles cultures) while simultaneously giving him the burden of a certain aloofness (he belongs to nowhere and to no one).
Absolutely on Music, by Haruki Murakami
Absolutely On Music is a series of conversations between novelist Haruki Murakami and conductor Seiji Ozawa. I was too young to remember when Seiji Ozawa was conductor of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (1965-1969).
Synecdoche
Synecdoche is a simplicity that doesn’t lie.
Cliché
For the time being, the images I make are the product of my true vision, and mine alone, but inevitably they will ascend to the pantheon of cliché as do all images, for like all truth the truth of my vision is provisional. It is not my entitlement, but a momentary privilege.
Morning Fog on Bob Lake
I hear only the sloop of my paddle through the water; the fog has silenced everything else. I’m headed to an island. I don’t know if the island has an official name, but I’ve taken to calling it Bird Island because, when I went there one afternoon earlier in the week, I found it occupied by a flock of Canada geese. Or is that a gaggle?
Seek out the ordinary
Turn away from famous sculptures and buildings. Turn away from brides in all their consumer-driven finery. Turn away from the terror and delight that draws us to scenes cordoned off by police tape. Instead, seek out the ordinary. Celebrate the mundane. Reveal beauty in the quotidian.
Confirmation Bias
Along with thousands of my colleagues, I pound the pavement, responding only to those scenes which hold precisely the features that confirm my view of what makes a good photograph, repeating the process until I have ground my bias into a cheap cliché.
Are these Chairs Modern or Postmodern?
Postmodernity is a sensibility that refuses to inhere in an object. Instead, its vague presence floats through the interstices of the scene. It reminds me of the rotten-egg smell that wafted through my elementary school when classmates set off stink bombs.
Photographing Babel
By one of those innumerable coincidences that seem to shape my life, I started reading Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, by Jorge Luis Borges, on the same day that I photographed Robarts Library alongside its distorted image reflected in one of those convex parking garage mirrors. One of the stories, “The Library of Babel”, opens in this way …
White Men In Business Suits
Why do street photographers do so little work with white men in business suits? Why are they so preoccupied with “grittier” themes? After all, if street photographers ignore white men in business suits, those white men might feel left out. Who knows? They might even feel discriminated against.
Migraines and Photography
Reviewing the art, I realize how varied migraine experience can be from one person to the next. For example, my migraines invariably begin with visual aura. There are six types of aura, but I’ve experienced only four. Mine start with scotoma (holes in my field of vision where things disappear), followed by tunnel vision, hemianopia (half the field of vision is obscured), and concluding with fortification spectra whose outlines shimmer almost like electric arcs.
My Grandmother’s Eyes
My Grandmother died on April 20th. I’ve never been present before when a death is declared. My grandmother had obviously expired, but the attending VON lacked the necessary government-approved certification to say unequivocally that she was dead. At times like this, I become strangely practical. I suggested we turn off the oxygen machine (why waste perfectly good oxygen?), but the VON said no; we needed to wait until his supervisor arrived and declared the death.