Thank you! I agree that we should attend more to the every day. What disturbs me though is how perceptions of photography can change so much that those images we delete as banal become resonant. I don’t have enough hard drives to store everything!
Charles Jencks is a fascinating person. I’d love to experience the Crawick Multiverse one day. I visited his Cosmic House in London last year and plan to revisit this year. I can’t pretend to understand what he’s going on about, but I’m intrigued. And I love his playful approach. A welcome antidote to modernism.
I like that his oeuvre is pretty manageable and look forward to making it to Cosmic House and the one in Northumberland. His books are fun despite the hard science. Of all postmodernism his has aged well.
Good connection around primitivism, that could bring us to land art for instance. Niepce is phenomenal, a reason why I make pinhole cameras. Oh, the original is somewhere in Texas
Well, everything was “latent” for centuries from Greeks through Durer & company with their cameras lucidas. Till the good Nicefore made the wonder one day
That sounds great. Actually I started my “photography art” buying a Polaroid decades ago and being inspired by his swimming pools. He made lots of interesting works of the kind.
I think it is Sisyphean, but we are indeed compelled - so as Camus would have suggested, embrace uncertainty and the limits of knowledge, do it, and be glad anyway. Bon chance!
Thank you for writing this. And for writing it so well, and concisely. It helps me articulate why taking photos for me has fundamentally been part of an effort to understand, rather than to 'take', 'make' or 'capture'. And photography has helped me discover that gratitude and wonder can occur even amid my total absence of understanding. The one does not require the other.
What a beautiful comment, thank you. Totally agree, although I feel driven—compelled—to make a workable map of reality. Hence, trying to understand the evolution of the eye. Where does it end?
Nice take. Here's another :) https://resurgencejourney.substack.com/p/what-was-the-first-photograph
Thank you! I agree that we should attend more to the every day. What disturbs me though is how perceptions of photography can change so much that those images we delete as banal become resonant. I don’t have enough hard drives to store everything!
The cloud allows the banal to survive!
There is a nice post here which mentions how those which originally got deleted ended up more reaonant! https://open.substack.com/pub/dinalitovsky/p/the-deja-vu-of-the-republican-national?r=265os&utm_medium=ios
thank you I had missed this one.
I’ve never stumbled upon Charles Jencks before this post but I’m intrigued and must now look him up. Thank you.
My pleasure! Enjoy. I love his diagrams.
Charles Jencks is a fascinating person. I’d love to experience the Crawick Multiverse one day. I visited his Cosmic House in London last year and plan to revisit this year. I can’t pretend to understand what he’s going on about, but I’m intrigued. And I love his playful approach. A welcome antidote to modernism.
I like that his oeuvre is pretty manageable and look forward to making it to Cosmic House and the one in Northumberland. His books are fun despite the hard science. Of all postmodernism his has aged well.
Good connection around primitivism, that could bring us to land art for instance. Niepce is phenomenal, a reason why I make pinhole cameras. Oh, the original is somewhere in Texas
What an innovation. I was shocked to discover that lithography was such a new (late 1790s) invention.
Well, everything was “latent” for centuries from Greeks through Durer & company with their cameras lucidas. Till the good Nicefore made the wonder one day
I would like to write about David Hockney’s theories about the art use of camera lucida/obscura. Fascinating history of vision.
That sounds great. Actually I started my “photography art” buying a Polaroid decades ago and being inspired by his swimming pools. He made lots of interesting works of the kind.
I think it is Sisyphean, but we are indeed compelled - so as Camus would have suggested, embrace uncertainty and the limits of knowledge, do it, and be glad anyway. Bon chance!
Thank you for writing this. And for writing it so well, and concisely. It helps me articulate why taking photos for me has fundamentally been part of an effort to understand, rather than to 'take', 'make' or 'capture'. And photography has helped me discover that gratitude and wonder can occur even amid my total absence of understanding. The one does not require the other.
What a beautiful comment, thank you. Totally agree, although I feel driven—compelled—to make a workable map of reality. Hence, trying to understand the evolution of the eye. Where does it end?
Absolutely. And coming up to 200 years so will be a big Niepce celebration soon.