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Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations By Wayne Koestenbaum
In the spring of 2010, the Brooklyn-based quarterly magazine Cabinet invited poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum to begin writing a regular column. Entitled "Legend," the column had a highly unusual premise. Every three months, the editors of the magazine would ask Koestenbaum to write one or more extended captions for a single photograph with which they had provided him; drawn from obscure vernacular, commercial and scientific sources, all of the images were unfamiliar to the author. After 18 installments, Koestenbaum concluded his column in the winter of 2015. Notes on Glaze , featuring an introductory essay by the author, collects all the "Legend" columns, as well as their accompanying photographs. Refusing the distancing language of critical disinterest, Koestenbaum’s columns always locate the author in intimate proximity to the subjects portrayed in the photographs and to the impossibly variegated cast of characters―ranging from Debbie Reynolds to Duccio, the Dalai Lama to Barbra Streisand; from Hegel to Pee-wee Herman, and Emily Dickinson to Cicciolina―that pass through these texts.
Wayne Koestenbaum (born 1958), a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, has published 17 books of poetry, criticism and fiction, including My 1980s & Other Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background (Turtle Point Press, 2012) and The Anatomy of Harpo Marx (University of California Press, 2012). His most recent book of poetry, The Pink Trance Notebooks , was published in 2015 by Nightboat Books.
Wayne Koestenbaum (born 1958), a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, has published 17 books of poetry, criticism and fiction, including My 1980s & Other Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background (Turtle Point Press, 2012) and The Anatomy of Harpo Marx (University of California Press, 2012). His most recent book of poetry, The Pink Trance Notebooks , was published in 2015 by Nightboat Books.
- GenresPhotography
96 pages, Hardcover
Published May 24, 2016
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About the author
Wayne Koestenbaum
82 books176 followersWayne Koestenbaum has published five books of critical prose, including The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and three books of poetry, including Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He is a Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 10, 2021
You are handed an unusual photograph with no information about its subjects or provenance. You are asked to craft your own caption. How do you proceed? Are you wordy, or are you “verbally retentive”? Do you feel that art must change the world, or do you note that, “we don’t ask jam to foment revolution” and ask, “Why must art be higher than jam?” If you’re intrigued but stuck, look to poet Wayne Koestenbaum’s Notes on Glaze for inspiration. Come for the photos, stay for arch captions, and remember, “When you stumble upon unpleasant information, reinterpret it.”
September 2, 2020
I was in middle school when I noticed a paperback on the shelf in my father's office-- "Stop, Look, and Write!" It was a Bantam paperback with black and white photos on the cover, and on the yellowing pages inside. They were peculiar images of culture, the wacky things people do, with no written explanation. Dad probably picked up at a garage sale, but I don't think anyone in the house used them for writing prompts, but the premise and title have always seemed so appealing to me. "Notes on Glaze" is based on the same principal, of using photographs of odd, ambiguous subjects and situations as a prompt. From his other books, we know that Koestenbaum has a fondness for catalysts--he's shared lists of them--so this is a fruitful situation for him. He's selected curious images that lead him in rich, digressive, associative paths. "The word 'zits' seems embedded in the name ZaSu Pitts and thereby connected to Erich von Stroheim's eight-hour long masterpiece 'Greed'. . . ." is an example of a Rube Goldberg association sequence that I particularly loved. Or "Heine steals Hegel's bagel." I wish I knew who Heine is, and wish this short book had room for more pictures and words.
December 5, 2016
I'm a fan of Wayne Kostenbaum's writing - especially when it is something like "Notes on Glaze." The very interesting journal and publisher, Cabinet Books, had Koestenbaum do a regular column where they send him anonymous photographs and in turn, he would comment on them, or more in detail, he uses the series of images as a foundation to reflect ideas, culture, and a bit of memoir writing as well. Not knowing their source or who took these photos, gives Koestenbaum the license to write short essays/commentaries on each image, and in a fashion, the photographs serve as an entrance way into the author's mind.
While reading this book, I felt compelled to do my own version of "Notes on Glaze," using the same images. Mine would be totally different from Koestenbaum, which strikes me as something profound. What we are getting is not information about these 'abandoned' photos, but the process and results of Koestenbaum's thinking pattern and he develops these ideas to make commentary or narratives out of them. So in a way, "Notes on Glaze" is a writer's notebook. I think anyone who writes, would benefit from this book. Not genius like, for instance Joe Barnaird's "I Remember," but still an important process and tool. So along the lines of Brainard and Raymond Queneau's "Exercise in Style", this is very much a remarkable book.
While reading this book, I felt compelled to do my own version of "Notes on Glaze," using the same images. Mine would be totally different from Koestenbaum, which strikes me as something profound. What we are getting is not information about these 'abandoned' photos, but the process and results of Koestenbaum's thinking pattern and he develops these ideas to make commentary or narratives out of them. So in a way, "Notes on Glaze" is a writer's notebook. I think anyone who writes, would benefit from this book. Not genius like, for instance Joe Barnaird's "I Remember," but still an important process and tool. So along the lines of Brainard and Raymond Queneau's "Exercise in Style", this is very much a remarkable book.
May 19, 2016
Here's my review for the Chicago Tribune:
Cabinet is a captivating quarterly arts-and-culture magazine that offers the print equivalent of a cabinet of curiosities. Each issue contains a collection of wonders and oddities ranging from regular columns to the eclectic and ever-changing material that speaks to each issue's stated theme.
From the spring of 2010 to the winter of 2015, one of Cabinet's many pieces of charming ephemera was the "Legend" column written by the poet, essayist and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum. The premise was that the editors would send him a found photograph from an obscure vernacular, commercial or scientific source without any context and he'd write an extended caption in response — like a map's legend, hence the title.
The results — weird, allusive, eloquent, erudite and frequently very funny — are collected in the small and attractive book "Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations," which weighs in at 112 pages, including all of the images and an introductory essay by Koestenbaum.
In this introduction, Koestenbaum looks back over this extended ekphrastic endeavor and says that his "instinct was to embellish, not to explain." By this, he means that "to the plights or doldrums depicted in these photos, I contribute an inquisitive overlayer of glaze," which could also be described as "the emptiness of enigma, and the fullness of aura," or, put another way, "a realm of throttled ineffability — that which can't speak — but also with a fantasy-life given free reign to meander and to amplify its own overtones."
The pleasure of each of these odd and often aphoristic fiction-essays is just that: getting lost while wandering through the fantasy-lands that Koestenbaum creates, for instance, for a black-and-white photograph of three men in a room decorated with Disney characters, all helping to hold down a tormented-looking fourth man wrapped in blankets atop a mattress. In the accompanying piece called "Restraint," Koestenbaum drops mentions of Micky Dolenz and the Monkees alongside mentions of Charles Baudelaire and Jeff Koons, asserting that, "Art requires restraint. Too much emotion, too many liberties taken, and the work falls apart."
Just as the column invited Koestenbaum to riff and speculate, so too is this book an invitation to the reader, asking us to wonder: What does it mean for a photograph to be found? Just discovered and collected or really looked at?
Really looked at, as when Koestenbaum responds to a color image of three brunette women in fancy costumes by imagining himself into their first person plural voice, writing, "We trusted Max Factor. We were not underage. We wore fascist charmeuse. We had problems. We sat on paper bags. We auditioned for the circus. We torched charm school. We were the grandmothers of Fran Lebowitz."
The collection also invites the reader to wonder: What does it mean to investigate when the investigator knows that he'll never be able to figure out what really happened?
Investigated as when Koestenbaum writes in reply to an image of two men in pristine white attire in front of a propeller plane with an epistolary story that begins, "Dear Mother, Our outfits are preposterously clean. War, thus far, delights us. Avoiding carnage, we waste time repairing airplanes."
In their "About the Images" note, the editors explain that "the vast majority of the photographs are so-called orphaned images, where the identity of the photographer or copyright holder cannot, for all intents and purposes, be ascertained." Their sources include the personal collection of photographer and image collector Oliver Wasow, two published collections of found images, and even a thrift store.
And that's another invitation offered by the book: to think about one's own ephemera, all the images and stories we're all always in the process of creating and leaving behind. Koestenbaum's poised and acrobatic sentences give these orphans a new home. His pieces possess an architectural quality as he builds them brick by beautiful brick, accreting them into strange structures, making this book a small town where you can walk into edifices that evoke, as Koestenbaum puts it, "the pleasure and discipline of trying to pack too much material into a very tight container."
In short, he has built a book that the reader will want to live in, at least for a bizarre photographic instant.
Cabinet is a captivating quarterly arts-and-culture magazine that offers the print equivalent of a cabinet of curiosities. Each issue contains a collection of wonders and oddities ranging from regular columns to the eclectic and ever-changing material that speaks to each issue's stated theme.
From the spring of 2010 to the winter of 2015, one of Cabinet's many pieces of charming ephemera was the "Legend" column written by the poet, essayist and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum. The premise was that the editors would send him a found photograph from an obscure vernacular, commercial or scientific source without any context and he'd write an extended caption in response — like a map's legend, hence the title.
The results — weird, allusive, eloquent, erudite and frequently very funny — are collected in the small and attractive book "Notes on Glaze: 18 Photographic Investigations," which weighs in at 112 pages, including all of the images and an introductory essay by Koestenbaum.
In this introduction, Koestenbaum looks back over this extended ekphrastic endeavor and says that his "instinct was to embellish, not to explain." By this, he means that "to the plights or doldrums depicted in these photos, I contribute an inquisitive overlayer of glaze," which could also be described as "the emptiness of enigma, and the fullness of aura," or, put another way, "a realm of throttled ineffability — that which can't speak — but also with a fantasy-life given free reign to meander and to amplify its own overtones."
The pleasure of each of these odd and often aphoristic fiction-essays is just that: getting lost while wandering through the fantasy-lands that Koestenbaum creates, for instance, for a black-and-white photograph of three men in a room decorated with Disney characters, all helping to hold down a tormented-looking fourth man wrapped in blankets atop a mattress. In the accompanying piece called "Restraint," Koestenbaum drops mentions of Micky Dolenz and the Monkees alongside mentions of Charles Baudelaire and Jeff Koons, asserting that, "Art requires restraint. Too much emotion, too many liberties taken, and the work falls apart."
Just as the column invited Koestenbaum to riff and speculate, so too is this book an invitation to the reader, asking us to wonder: What does it mean for a photograph to be found? Just discovered and collected or really looked at?
Really looked at, as when Koestenbaum responds to a color image of three brunette women in fancy costumes by imagining himself into their first person plural voice, writing, "We trusted Max Factor. We were not underage. We wore fascist charmeuse. We had problems. We sat on paper bags. We auditioned for the circus. We torched charm school. We were the grandmothers of Fran Lebowitz."
The collection also invites the reader to wonder: What does it mean to investigate when the investigator knows that he'll never be able to figure out what really happened?
Investigated as when Koestenbaum writes in reply to an image of two men in pristine white attire in front of a propeller plane with an epistolary story that begins, "Dear Mother, Our outfits are preposterously clean. War, thus far, delights us. Avoiding carnage, we waste time repairing airplanes."
In their "About the Images" note, the editors explain that "the vast majority of the photographs are so-called orphaned images, where the identity of the photographer or copyright holder cannot, for all intents and purposes, be ascertained." Their sources include the personal collection of photographer and image collector Oliver Wasow, two published collections of found images, and even a thrift store.
And that's another invitation offered by the book: to think about one's own ephemera, all the images and stories we're all always in the process of creating and leaving behind. Koestenbaum's poised and acrobatic sentences give these orphans a new home. His pieces possess an architectural quality as he builds them brick by beautiful brick, accreting them into strange structures, making this book a small town where you can walk into edifices that evoke, as Koestenbaum puts it, "the pleasure and discipline of trying to pack too much material into a very tight container."
In short, he has built a book that the reader will want to live in, at least for a bizarre photographic instant.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews