Known and Strange Things

Authorship, after all, is not only what is created but also what is selected.

“The photograph isn’t what was photographed, it’s something else,” Garry Winogrand once said. “It’s about transformation.” The photographic image is a fiction created by a combination of lenses, cameras, film, pixels, color (or its absence), time of day, season.

objects are reservoirs of specific personal experience, filled with the hours of some person’s life.

ekphrastic

The camera is an instrument of transformation. It can make what it sees more beautiful, more gruesome, milder, darker, all the while insisting on the plain reality of its depiction.

Even when the end is certain, the days must be lived, and little can be done to hurry things along.

For years now, when I cannot sleep, I rise from bed and watch Jacques Derrida talk. I watch what he said sometime in the late 1990s. Each time that I write something, he said, and it feels like I’m advancing into new territory (he demonstrates “advance” with his left hand), somewhere I haven’t been before, and this type of advance often demands cer

The images with which Tranströmer charges his poems bring to mind the concept of acheiropoieta, “making without hands”; in Byzantine art, acheiropoietic images were those believed to have come miraculously into being without a painter’s intervention. The Shroud of Turin and the Veil of Veronica are the most famous examples.

Fernweh is a longing to be away from home, a desire to be in faraway places. Fernweh is similar to wanderlust but, like heimweh, has a sickish, melancholy tinge.

In witnessing something far-fetched, something brought out before us from the distant perimeter of human experience, we are in some way fortified for our own inevitable, if lesser, struggles.