Best Writing on Photography Ever!

[jnantz]

I LOVE highly specialized language. That large sentence reminds me of the abstracts to a large papers I wrote
on Coal Gasification and the Roxbury Gas Company; and Electric Lighting, and the Great American Storefront: I won't tell you how it ends.

[Tin Can]

Greg,
How many pics got you to that sense of mind?

The more we shoot the better we see.

Just like reading books, maybe.

[Tin Can]

The Seven Learning Styles
Visual (spatial):You prefer using pictures, images, and spatial understanding.
Aural (auditory-musical): You prefer using sound and music.
Verbal (linguistic): You prefer using words, both in speech and writing.
Physical (kinesthetic): You prefer using your body, hands and sense of touch.
Logical (mathematical): You prefer using logic, reasoning and systems.
Social (interpersonal): You prefer to learn in groups or with other people.
Solitary (intrapersonal): You prefer to work alone and use self-study.

and Maslow's hierarchy of needs

[pepeguitarra]

Thank you. I did try to understand it, but I couldn't. Your translation helped me. I am used to read engineering books, where everything has to be able to be demonstrated with an equation.

[Hal Incandenza]

Yes, this is obviously written in artist-curator-scholar-critic-Speak, and the esoteric vocabulary and syntax is typical of the language often deployed (or in this case, clumsily deployed) by the inhabitants of the contemporary art world.

In any event, for those who might be interested, the high-browed sensibilities of the author are focused on a rather wonderful large format photographer, Thomas Demand, whose work just happens to be somewhat demanding (bad pun intended). He uses mostly a 4x5.

[Tin Can]

I see...http://www.thomasdemand.info/

[Christopher Barrett]

I see...http://www.thomasdemand.info/

Actually, I dig his work and have a book of it at the studio.

[Tin Can]

I am NOT criticizing, but do wonder why nobody linked to the artist!

Actually, I dig his work and have a book of it at the studio.

[Mike in NY]

“It is this sand-blasted speculation or rather en-spectralization, the ghosting and subsequent miasma of capitalism as it exists in the economy of images that we regard as relative at the very least-namely the aptitude to regard photography if not truth, certainly as plausibly disagreeable in a shared system of acknowledged solutions for knowledge-based communication”

[DonJ]

Back in the late 1970s I entered a print is a show (attached image). Print was accepted in the show. Went to the opening and was surprised to see that the print was hung to be the first print to be sen as you as you entered the gallery, obviously the best location in the show. A Curator was walking over to my print with a crowd of people following him. He started to talk about my photograph for 5 to 10 minutes. He was explaining how the photographer created the image as a metaphor for life itself. If the photographer were here today, this is what the photographer would tell us. Paraphrasing what he said: Life began and rose from the earth, on the left side. Was experiences by the circle of the branches, and in the end died going back into the earth from whence it came from. I just stood in back and never ID'd myself. Truth is: It stopped snowing outside. Went out with my Hass and its 50mm lens. Hiked maybe 2 minutes into the woods near my house. Suddenly the Sun came out. Started shooting as fast as I could before the snow began to melt and fall from the branches of the trees above. Lens was pre-focused for around 6 - 10 feet away and fully stopped down (Was shooting Ektachrome and processing as a color neg, so its effective ASA was way up there). Image wasn't deliberately composed but more like just a completely lucky shot. Think that it was the only image out of the 12 exposures worth printing.

You should have asked if he could tell you how much change you had in your pocket, since he could read minds.