Category: book shelf

reviews and essentials –

Steichen: One Picture

Posted on Posted in book shelf, Criticism, on photographers, overnight notes

Clement Greenberg reviewed Steichen’s “A Life in Photography.” [1964] and wasn’t impressed… only one photography was worthwhile: the 1921 Dancer’s Hands.

“one wonders at what must have been the lack of a capacity for self-criticism that let Steichen abandon the straightforwardness of these (early) works..”

Clement Greenberg reviewed Steichen’s “A Life in Photography.” [1964] and wasn’t impressed… only one photography was worthwhile: the 1921 Dancer’s Hands. Saying: “..nicely composed … would be artistically inert were it not for what the woman’s arms evoke of attractive femaleness…”

“Photography’s advantage over painting… the enormously greater ease and speed with which it achieves realism. This speed and ease have radically expanded the literary possibilities of pictorial art.”

The windblown “Wind Fire” image is of a student. It strikes me as being one flavor of the terpsichorean image of John Wimberley (a key person in the revival of pyro negatives)

Terpsichorean pose

Sources:
https://www.academia.edu/30974476/Footprints_on_stone._An_outline_of_Isadora_Duncan_presence_today
http://www.artnet.com/artists/edward-steichen/
https://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/edward-steichen-1879-1973-wind-fire-therese-5972040-details.aspx
https://huxleyparlour.com/artists/edward-steichen/
https://isadoraduncan.org/foundation/isadora-duncan/
http://www.isadoraduncanarchive.org/dancer/3/


https://www.theartstory.org/artist/steichen-edward/artworks/
https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/california/articles/ladies-we-love-isadora-duncan/

Meaning Comes from

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, book shelf, morning wood, on photographers

Ideas, histories are built of parts. Combined, recombined. Taken apart for a gear here, there. A phrase, Tones. Related. distorted. We talk and listen to the past. The past we passed through. The past we are making. Nothing is purebred. This isn’t genesis. This is synthesis.

Cormac McCarthy forms words from his landings. Driving, looking, reading. His books holdout the anti-western. Not the formations of Carl Chiarenza, a PhD. worder of photography, photographers, those histories. The only thing McCarthy and Chiarenza share is my studio table.

Pictures Come from Pictures. We do not know who gave birth to the first — or why or how. We can speculate on the cave or on its source of inspiration; we can speculate on how the first pictures were perceived. But we can’t be sure. — Carl Chiarenza, Landscapes of the Mind, 1988.

McCarthy wouldn’t have punctuated it as correctly. Probably wouldn’t have said that much without making a new, better fitting word. That’s why his pictures are formed of letters not shadows.

“the ugly fact is books are made out of books. . . . The novel depends for its life on the novels that have been written.” Cormac McCarthy