america
Not long ago, America was more than the sum of its parts. Now, it is less. Around World War II, we were proud as a people but modest as individuals. Fewer than two people in ten said yes when asked, Are you a very important person? Today, more than six in ten say yes. Where we once thought ourselves collectively strong, we now regard ourselves as... See more
William Strauss • The Fourth Turning
Worldly possessions, from cleansers and cars to homes and office buildings, are expendable. We have arranged things so that we think we must keep producing, consuming and producing again to survive. Our inventiveness has turned upon us to yield a population explosion, an automobile invasion, mass-education gigantism, television-age persuasion and a
... See moreI hope to offer viewers the opportunity to embrace friendship as an acceptance of opacity, a rejection of trying to “identify” these people as particular kinds of eaters,
Just a moment...
photography and the opacity of people - not thinking about who they are, what their story is, but just taking them at face value
“Beauty in the European sense has always had a premeditated quality to it.
We've always had an aesthetic intention and a long-range plan. That's what
enabled Western man to spend decades building a Gothic cathedral or a Renaissance
piazza. The beauty of New York rests on a completely different base. It's
unintentional. It arose independent of human
... See more
It is primarily we intellectuals and elites who culture shop, picking and choosing what works best for us. That's true in Europe and the US, where each group of elites is inoculated from the least admirable qualities. Well-to-do Americans can escape the banal landscapes, either through travel or by living in the exclusive US neighborhoods that share European qualities, and find belonging in communities formed from their careers that cross national and cultural boundaries. Highly motivated Europeans can move to America, or work in a large corporation and escape European provincialism, while not giving up the aesthetic and communal benefits it offers.
In the works of design and construction just reviewed, two qualities seem to stand out as tokens of promise. One is the continuing search for new aesthetic expression, in a contemporary idiom. The second is youthfulness. However old these structures may be, they embody a youthful spirit which has always been a prime ingredient in great design.
Ideal
... See moreAs American a picture – the faces don’t editorialise or criticise or say anything but: “This is the way we are in real life and if you don’t like it I don’t know anything about it ’cause I’m living my own life my way, and may God bless us all mebbe ... if we deserve it”’
‘It changed 20th-century art’: revisiting Robert Frank’s The Americans – in pictures
kerouac about robert frank’s americans
“Ugliness can be shocking, it can have impact—like a man spitting in your face: but it can also be given beauty by a sensitive photographer. Frank is sensitive, but apparently he is without love. There is no pity in his images. They are images of hate and hopelessness, of desolation and preoccupation with death.