Writings

The picture necessarily fails both its maker and its subject matter. As painful as that sounds, it's actually ok: as a new thing in the world, the photograph is not to be judged by fidelity to mind or referent, but by its own internal standard of usefulness.

Who better to roam the French capital with than Mark Steinmetz, author of Paris in my time? We started our conversation over breakfast in a bustling café in Montmartre and then made our way to the Place de Clichy, with Mark all the while making pictures (listen closely for the shutter) for an ongoing project. We talked about Atget and Cartier-Bresson, light and weather, punks and tennis. About Winogrand and exceeding yourself with a camera.

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Past experience (the self) and the current moment (the world outside the self) come together in a creative moment that only exists because of our hope, because we realize the possibility of bridging self and not-self and making it communicable to others in the future.

A moment of unexpected loss is accompanied by a Lucinda Williams song . . . which invokes Vic Chestnut . . . who then summons Wallace Stevens and his "fabulous blackbird / Of thirteen stages." After that it's not too far to Lee Freidlander, Andrea Modica, and Mark Steinmetz, and the beauty of inflections and innuendoes.

A couple months after our publication of John Gossage's A Dozen Failures, we talked with John about that title, some of his previous projects, and the history of photobooks running from Atget to Evans and Frank to Baltz and up to today. The conversation was edited into “A Walking Conversation with John Gossage,” for SPOT magazine, published by the Houston Center for Photography.

And that failures book he talks about? You can get your own copy here.

I reflected for a long time on this request to name five non-photography books I would put on a syllabus for other photographers to read. As the months went by, I began to question my procrastination. Was I afraid my list wouldn’t sound smart enough? Or did I not believe I was worthy of giving meaningful recommendations? 

I’d always thought of the title of William Eggleston’s The Democratic Forest as a sort of mischevious redundancy. Left to its own devices, a forest is a model of democracy, and it can hardly be otherwise. It takes human intervention in the form of monoculture to strip the diversity from the woods, making them more easily exploitable but less able to survive in a challenging environment on their own. In its recent and weighty Steidl expansion, Eggleston’s forest has suffered just such an intrusion. And to similarly ill effect.

Raymond Meeks’s work challenges us, at those moments in our lives where a cycle comes full circle, to look for the beauty in what remains. Because only in that beauty can we find the reasons to move forward once again. “My fear,” Robert Adams once said, “is that we in the art world are not consistently and ardently enough addressing that old traditional job of art: to reconcile us to life.” The openheartedness, the integrity, and the dignity with which Meeks continues to do this in his work, is hopeful.

My copy of Beauty in Photography is pretty heavily underlined throughout, and nowhere more than in the title essay. But with all the marks and margin notes I’ve made, there is only one instance of double underlining:

Why is Form beautiful? Because, I think, it helps us meet our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore our suffering without meaning.

There’s much to unpack in that short Q and A. 

Books are fun. Music is fun. People are fun (lots). Pictures are fun. Lists are fun. This past year was fun, for the most part.

Here are a few things that gave me hope in 2015.