Writings

Falseness close to kin

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...

While walking with Mark Steinmetz

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 ...

On hope

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 bridgin...

I lost it

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." Afte...

While walking with John Gossage

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 Ev...

The forest for the trees

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 ot...

Intuitions of unity

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 ...

Some things I really liked this year and one I didn’t

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.

I remember

I remember writing these words, from the play In the Park by Edgar Oliver, in my notebook immediately after I saw him perform the piece last summer: Longing is the only magic of which we are capab...

The spirit of the case

Judy Fiskin says that Walker Evans succeeded where his FSA boss Roy Stryker failed "because Evans settled for art. Stryker succumbed to the false promise of photography, strove to represent litera...