Category: book shelf

reviews and essentials –

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

Hollis Frampton

Posted on Posted in A Symbol Life, book shelf, on photographers, overnight notes

Hollis William Frampton, Jr. (March 11, 1936 – March 30, 1984) Frampton died of cancer on March 30, 1984, a few weeks after his 48th birthday. I’ve missed him for over 38 years.

To begin your Frampton quest, get the October Files book. It is about him more than by him. Hollis in his voice if represented in “On The Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters” — going deeper into the media world with ever more Frampton, read “Buffalo Heads.”

an October Files Book.

a.co/0PTJVZL

  • A Pentagram for Conjuring the Narrative
  • Edward Muybridge: Fragments of a Tesseract
  • Film in the House of the Word
  • Incisions in History/Segments of Eternity
  • For a Metahistory of Film:Commonplace notes and Hypothesis
  • Notes on Composing in Film
  • Meditations Around Paul Strand
  • Impromptus on Edward Weston
  • The Withering Away of the State of the Art
  • A Stipulation of Terms from Maternal Hopi
  • Digressions on the Photographic Agony
  • A Lecture

Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video: Texts, 1968–1980 (1983)

  • Goldensohn, Barry (1985), Memoir of Hollis Frampton, in Michelson, Annette, (ed.) Hollis Frampton: A Special Issue October, 32 MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (pp. 7–16)
  • Jenkins, Bruce & Krane,Susan (1984), Hollis Frampton: Recollections-Recreations (p. 120) The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, ISBN 0-262-10030-4
  • Michelson, Annette, ed. (1985) Hollis Frampton: A Special Issue October, 32 MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusett

Hollis was of the time and mind when photography and film where becoming media. He along with the Buffalo Heads were preamble to Pictures Generation.

‘photographers are themselves, in a limited way, sensitive to light. it is their responsibility to extend the range and power of their sensibilities. ‘ hollis frampton