Tag Archives: Criticism

Mauron on Mallarmé

February 8, 2013

“All who remember the day when first they looked into the Poems or the Divagations will testify to that curious feeling of exclusion which put them, in the face of a text written with their words (and moreover, as they could somehow… Continue reading →

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Barthelme on not knowing

February 1, 2013

“What is magical about the object is that it at once invites and resists interpretation” — from “On Writing” in Not-Knowing by Donald Barthelme. Photograph by Eva Vermandel, from Splinter.

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Sante on photography

December 29, 2012

“Sometimes, looking at these cards, you come upon a picture that makes you feel as if its maker had just discovered photography, had made it up by himself from scratch. The American real photo postcard is a laboratory for the… Continue reading →

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Adams on Form

December 29, 2012

“Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us to meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering is without meaning. James Dickey was right when he asked, rhetorically, “What is… Continue reading →

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O’Sullivan & Adams

November 23, 2012

“We know, as we recognize the commonness of places, that this is our world and the the photographer has not cheated on his way to his affirmation of meaning.” — Robert Adams, “In The Nineteenth-Century West”, Why People Photograph Photograph: Timothy O’Sullivan, Sand Dunes,… Continue reading →

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Hampl on Looking

September 16, 2012

“[My father] liked to look across the river, watch for Canada geese rising in formation over the great flyway. He appreciated a muddle of pastel light and mist across the wide water. He knew how to bow his head to… Continue reading →

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Berger on Art

April 6, 2012

“Art is neither value-free nor an independent source of values; to one extent or another, it always reflects the needs, politics, intellectual and aesthetic priorities, and tastes of the artist, the institutions that support and disseminate his or her work,… Continue reading →

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Piper on Political Art

April 6, 2012

“Motivated by self-censorship, and by the strategic understanding that making explicitly political art lessens the chances and the magnitude of professional success, this kind of implicitly political art is an expression of imprisonment within the bounds of political conflict, rather… Continue reading →

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One off: Shelby Lee Adams.

April 6, 2012

                                    “Sloans on the Porch, Sloan’s Fork, 1988″ © Shelby Lee Adams. “These Appalachian families are down and out, but stubbornly proud —… Continue reading →

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Szarkowski on Charlie Rose

March 23, 2012

A brief 20 min segment in which Charlie Rose gives a light-touch interview to the inimical John Szarkowski, not all that long before his sad death.  Rose is not the best interlocutor for those in search a trenchant and substantial… Continue reading →

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