Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (Berlin Family Lectures)
Perhaps their photographs don’t make us think of the photographers’ bravery, the way other conflict pictures do, or urge us to immediate action. We look at them anyway, for the change that they bring about elsewhere: in the core of the sympathetic self. We look at them for the way they cooperate with the imagination, the way they contain what canno
... See moreTeju Cole • Known and Strange Things
All too often in our media, the words take us all the way there, but the photographs, habituated to a certain safety, hold back.
Teju Cole • Known and Strange Things
It is, in large part, our familiarity with the photographers and videographers that places their output in a different category than the 20th-century war images on which our inherited discourse is based. Even if skillful, these are not works of art; they are distress signals. There is no hand-wringing about the politics of representation. The victi... See more
The Editors • Who Sees Gaza? | The Editors
Soleil Saint-Cyr added
Why, then, do I feel slightly uneasy at the disparity between the opulence of the book and the degradation of its subjects? Some questions have no easy answers, or, as Susan Sontag wrote: “The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.”
Bill Jay • LensWork #83 (The Bill Jay's Best of EndNotes issue)
the form of the photo encourages remembrance, but the content remains outside our memory.
Adam Kirsch • Emblems of the Passing World
julie added
What does it mean to care about art but not about the people who made that art? And this brings me again to the annotation I found
Teju Cole • Tremor: A Novel
Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs.