This lovely and thought-provoking essay, “Fear and Photography: Opening a discussion on lost images,” by Ian Aleksander Adams in Ahorn Magazine (Issue 2). One glittering little tidbit:
“While the majority of academic and professional writing is concerned with the conscious choices of image making, the average person has more experience with the second kind of non-image: the image accidentally lost. These experiences are educational, as photographers learn to take better care of their equipment, to properly secure their film canister while developing, etc, but the impact of these experiences on memory and the resulting fear of loss is often less explored.”
Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s painfully gorgeous and moving two-part letter (originally featured in the Rumpus’s Letters in the Mail project), on panic, survival, art, and joy. Whew.
Another heavy-hitting essay from Amy Monticello (she is doing some tough and scarily good writing!). The piece is “When I Parented My Father,” and it was originally featured in The Nervous Breakdown (they can do no wrong), and was picked up by Salon.
"Books of Ice," sculptures by Basia Irland, and text by Kathleen Dean Moore, in Orion Magazine. An inspiring project.
And you? What’s on your (virtual or literal) bedside table?
Great link list, Hannah. Have a wonderful weekend.
ReplyDeleteThank you for all of your lovely links....I think you hae read this...it is so touching
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/nora-ephrons-final-act.html?_r=0
have a great weekend Hannah
Several poetry books + The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. Still. I read it in snippets. It's written in fragments!
ReplyDeleteI like that Adams essay a lot for the ground it covers in a short space. The seemingly contradictory feeling of best experiencing a moment by consciously capturing it is a big part of my writing poetry. I also think of the Hopi, who like many tribes forbid their beautiful faces and magnificent scenery to be photographed, for much the same reason that Adams discusses, of the record supplanting the original, the pale thing replacing the living spirit. I also like the riskiness of his going old-school, tho I don’t quite follow what he means by fear, that there’s something wrong with losing the perfect image. “The conscious choice to not raise the lens,” tho, that I get!
ReplyDeleteThe dead parent essays are painful; I’m not sure the pain is ever worth lines like “when I do reach for his body, it’s almost always when I menstruate. I beg him to enter my barren place. The place where whatever life I might have carried has already slipped away.”
These last few weeks have been strange for me reading-wise. Not one but two people shoved “Boomerang” by Michael Lewis in my hands and begged me to read it. And Jerry Rothenberg sent me an advance copy of he and Pierre Joris’s monumental “Poems of the Millennium Part 4.” I have yet to barely crack either one.