Hera > Recent Status Updates

"Abracadabrant" = belonging to no known language, Henry James

Now thinking about accessibility to what is seen. Accessibility as a modality in photography.

"What is surreal is the distance imposed, and bridged, by the photograph: the social distance and the distance in time."

"But essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own."

"The error of Surrealist militants was to imagine the surreal to be something universal, that is, a matter of psychology, whereas it turns out to be what is most local, ethnic, class-bound, dated."

"In the fairy tale of photography the magic box insures veracity and banishes error, compensates for inexperience and rewards innocence."

"Surrealism has always courted accidents, welcomed the uninvited, flattered disorderly presences." Kuleshov effect?

"What is safe no longer monopolizes public imagery. The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally vacant are seen daily on newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair."

"Arbus's view that self-revelation is a continuous, evenly distributed process is another way of maintaining the Whitmanesque imperative: treat all moments as of equal consequence."

"Steichen's choice of photographs assumes a human condition or a human nature shared by everybody. ... denies the determining weight of history - of genuine and historically embedded differences, injustices, & conflicts. Arbus's photographs undercut politics just as decisively, by suggesting a world in which everybody is an alien, hopelessly isolated, immobilized in mechanical, crippled identities and relationships."

"By furnishing this already crowded world with a duplicate one of images, photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is."

"Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from /not/ accepting the world as it looks."

"Photographs are valued because they give information. They tell one what there is; they make an inventory. ... [T]heir value is inestimable. ... The information that photographs can give starts to seem very important at that moment in cultural history when everyone is thought to have a right to something called news." Thinking about this + social media + pseudo-events.

"A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights - to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on."

"Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation."

"As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure."

"Language's most basic operation is, I realize, to cause us to believe that something invented is a given."

"The stranger isn't my love or my lover. The stranger is someone I seem to have forgotten, whose story I must nevertheless tell. Again, today, if I must choose between love and memory, I choose memory."

"I only want writing made by a human, not necessarily for the writing, but because of what's behind it; where it came from, what it took someone to start it (incredible), rework it (unbelievable) and complete it (miraculous). The human will to write and share one's idiosyncratic ways of thinking, feeling, and then communicating it to others takes guts."

"I want to be a guard at the gate of indecision. Want to know the cause of everything, all things. [...] I think he's fabulous, I want to find him flawless, I'm ready to kneel at his feet. I think men tire me. [...] That's where you belong. Permanently framed in a romantic episode. I'll tell you more."

"There is something fascinating about a person's face when they're not falling apart because of their imperfections and self-loathing. Pleasure is a lure."