Best Shots (93) ~ Jane Bown
(120) Jane Bown ~ Jeremy Thorpe leaving court in 1979(12 November 2009).
Labels: Best Shots
“What we need is a critique of visual culture that is alert to the power of images for good and evil and that is capable of discriminating the variety and historical specificity of their uses.” - W.J.T. Mitchell. Picture Theory (1994).
(120) Jane Bown ~ Jeremy Thorpe leaving court in 1979Labels: Best Shots
Graffiti written in a bathroom stall in Ali Al Salem Labels: van Agtmael

Labels: Obituaries
Labels: environmentalism
"What we can do right now is choose a better future and pass a bill that brings us to the very cusp of building what so many generations of Americans have sought to build -- a better health care system for this country."For those that need a translator, our hoper-in-chief acknowledges that we almost got meaningful health care reform. We are on 'the very cusp' of having done something useful and efficient and fair. But not quite.
Labels: Data Graphics, political economy
I just learned of this exhibition of work by Milton Rogovin that is opening tomorrow at the ArtRage Gallery in Syracuse. I have posted several times about Rogovin, most recently here.Labels: Local Event, Milton Rogovin
"So the good news for Republicans is that they now have two more governorships. The bad news is that they’re still Republicans — with all the baggage that entails." ~ Ruy TeixeiraThat is the conclusion to this assessment of the off year elections this past week. It sounds about right to me.
“The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their Labels: Chris Jordan
Sarah Palin's book tour is a gift for her base.
No stops are planned in Seattle, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and other major cities and book-buying communities that are standard for authors on the road, but where the voters tend to be Democrats.
Beyond a Nov. 16 television interview with Oprah Winfrey, nothing is scheduled for Chicago. New York will feature media appearances only. Instead, the itinerary for Palin, whose "Going Rogue" comes out Nov. 17, includes Noblesville, Ind.; Washington, Pa.; and Rochester, N.Y.
[. . .]
The tour starts Nov. 18 at a Barnes & Noble in Grand Rapids, Mich., where Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, and running mate Sen. John McCain made a campaign appearance last fall.
Choosing Michigan as the first state fits the book's title, which refers to reports from last year that the then-Alaska governor was defying McCain's staff and instead had gone "rogue." Palin openly expressed her unhappiness with the campaign's decision to pull out of Michigan and effectively concede the state to Democrat Barack Obama.
"It was a mutual decision between Harper and Palin," Andreadis said of choosing Grand Rapids. "And Barnes & Noble has a great store there."
Other parts of the tour will mirror the 2008 race. On Dec. 7, Palin is booked for the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., not far from last year's Republican National Convention, where Palin's speech — in which she likened herself to a pit bull — made her a national sensation.
[. . .]
The full schedule has not been completed, but confirmed locations — many of which Palin campaigned at last year — include Cincinnati; Columbus, Ohio; Roanoke, Va.; the Army post in Fort Bragg, N.C.; Orlando, Fla.; and Albuquerque, N.M..
Palin is setting up "interviews" with the phalanx of Fox network numb-skulls and other right-wing mouthpieces. And she will get powder-puff treatments by Oprah and Barbara Walters. That sure is roguish - stick to venues where no one will challenge you. Nice.
Labels: Local Event
Doubletake**Solnit is considerably more sanguine than Heaney about the prospects for fortuitous convergences, of rhyming - and she is right, it seems to me, that it happens, from some at least, more than once in a lifetime. And, while she did not say so, it is true too that while poetry and art cannot fully remedy the harms done to people, they can go a long way toward mitigating, for a time, some of the worst effects.
by Seamus Heaney
Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home
History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
on the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
and cures and healing wells.
Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter self-revealing
double-take of feeling.
if there's fire on the mountain
or lightning and storm
and a god speaks from the sky.
That means someone is hearing
the outcry and the birth-cry
of new life at its term.
Labels: poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Seamus Heaney
Labels: Obituaries
"Events, by definition, are occurrences that interrupt routine
processes and routine procedures." ~ Hannah Arendt
"If this proposal is correct, then it is easy to appreciate why
we so often identify or describe events in terms of their causes
and effects. Not only are these features that often interest us
about events, but they are features guaranteed to individuate
them in the sense not only of telling them apart but also of
telling them together." ~ Donald Davidson


Labels: borders, Brian Rose, Jürgen Ritter, walls
"The police and the media willfully, if not consciously, mistake what kind of danger civil disobedients pose. Martin Luther King, that reader of Thoreau and great advocate of nonviolent civil disobedience, was a dangerous man in his time, because he posed a threat to the status quo, and it was for that reason that the FBI followed him and many hated him. Like Thoreau, he went to jail; like Thoreau he posed no physical danger to anyone. But to admit that activists can be dangers to the status quo is to admit, first, that there is a status quo; second, that it may be an unjust and unjustifiable thing; and third, that it can indeed be changed, by passionate people and nonviolent means. Better to portray activists as criminals and the status quo as the natural order -- and only celebrate revolutionaries long after their causes are won and their voices are softened by time, or misrepresentation; for Thoreau and King are still dangerous men to those who pay attention to their words."Just so ... I highly recommend a trip out to RIT on Wednesday evening.
Labels: Local Event, Rebecca Solnit
Labels: Arundhati Roy, India
Labels: UofR
On PoetrySome time ago I read a collection of John Berger's essays* and noticed, among other things, that he had quoted some remarkable verses from Argentine poet Juan Gelman. I had never heard of Gelman but have now tracked down what seems to be the sole collection of his work in English translation.** Gelman spent many years in political exile and, while it is now safe for him to return, he still does not reside in Argentina. His son, daughter-in-law and grand-daughter were disappeared by the regime. And he nevertheless manages poems of hope and beauty and humor.
by Juan Gelman
a couple of things have to be said/
that nobody reads it much/
that those nobodies are few and far between/
that everyone's caught up in the world crisis/ and
with the business of putting food on the table/
and that's no small problem/ I remember
when my uncle juan died of hunger/ he used to say
no problem since he'd forgotten how to eat anyway/
but the problems came later/ when
there was no cash for the coffin/
and when finally the official truck came from the city
to take him away uncle juan turned into a bird/
the guys from the city looked at him with contempt/ complaining
they were always being given a hard time/ that
they were men and men was what they buried/ and not
birds like uncle juan/ especially
since unc was singing cheep-cheep all the way to the
municipal crematorium/
which seemed to them like a disrespect they didn't like one bit/
and when they slapped him to shut him up/
the cheep-cheep was heard in the cab of the truck and even
their ears rang with cheep-cheep/
that's how uncle juan was/ always singing/
and he didn't see that death was any reason to stop singing/
he even went into the oven singing cheep-cheep/ and some
chirping rose up from his ashes for a while/
and the city guys stared at their grey shoes in shame/ but
to get back to poetry/
poets are having a rough time of it these days/
nobody reads poetry much/ only a few nobodies/
the profession has lost its prestige/ its getting harder every day
for a poet/
to get a girl to fall in love with him/
to run for president/ to get credit at the grocery store/
to get some warrior to perform heroics to be sung/ or
some king to pay three pieces of gold per verse/
and no one knows if this is because we're running out of
girls/grocers/warriors/kings/
or just poets/he two things at once and there's no use
racking you brains over the question/
the beautiful thing is knowing you can sing cheep-cheep
in the strangest of circumstances/
uncle juan after he died/ and now me
so that you'll love me/
~~~~~~~~
The Deluded
by Juan Gelman
hope fails us often
grief, never.
that's why some think
that known grief is better
than unknown grief.
they believe that hope is an illusion.
they are deluded by grief.
~~~~~~~~
Labels: John Berger, Juan Gelman, poetry
How Gardeners Learn Things from Invisible Institute on Vimeo.
Shirley Burtz from Invisible Institute on Vimeo.
Labels: Obituaries

Pianist Vijay Iyer has put out a couple of recordings in as many years that are truly terrific. The records are released on independent labels - Sunnyside and ACT. While both are very good, I especially like the new trio recording - the tunes are spacious and the interaction between the musicians embodies a real egalitarianism. This is not simply drums/bass supporting a soloist! It reminds me in some respects of the interplay between the members of Air (Henry Threadgill/Steve McCall/ Fred Hopkins) ~ and that is, to my mind, very rarefied company. Finally, what is not to like about a musician who takes inspiration for his record titles from readings of Cornel West or Antonio Gramsci? In any case, here is a sample:Labels: Enthusiasms, Music
Labels: political economy, Posner, UofC
Labels: Adam Michnik, politics
"He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn't know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast violent, circling, driving ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace. Worse Things kept happening."And for much of the first half of the book politics - large scale disaster - provides the backdrop to the unfolding personal disaster on which Roy focuses. Indeed, politics intrudes in various, almost always destructive, ways into the lives of her cast of characters. One important way it does so is through the operation of legal and informal restrictions on the freedom of the women in the story whose options are limited severely by lack of educational opportunity, legal restrictions on inheritance, domestic violence, sexual harassment, the stigma of divorce.
Labels: Arundhati Roy, India, portraits
"Article 25 (1) Everyone has a right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to social security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood i circumstances beyond his control.
(2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same protection." ~ Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
Labels: Václav Havel
“As is well-known by now, all of his photographs are taken in his studio; employing existing photographs, usually from the media but sometimes his own, as his sources, Demand uses paper, cardboard, cellophane and other flimsy, everyday materials to construct full-scale replicas of actually or formerly existing places. . . . These empty stage sets are what we see in the photographs. The reconstructions follow the general lineaments of their originals, but with most detail eliminated. In particular, every trace of language has completely vanished:. . . In general, since everything in the photographs has been newly built, nothing shows any signs of wear, any smudges or defects. Each thing has become a sort of abstraction of itself.”I do not know much about Demand, although I did post his contribution to the "Best Shot" series at The Guardian a couple of years ago now. The image above is the one he selected for that purpose. I recommend that you follow the links and read about it. It turns out, I think, that while Dmand's work is, as Schwabsky nicely reveals, about representation it also is about politics.
"These images construct illusions only to deflate them. The image is empty, and eerily disinfected, and Demand makes sure you know it. You see the seams in every wall, the folding of the corners of the furniture. These are two-dimensional pictures of three-dimensional pictures based on other two-dimensional pictures of the real world. And how real is that, anyway? I suddenly feel like I've lost track."
"Demand's . . . work asks, among other things, . . . whether and how photographs can be about things that they are not of."
Labels: Thomas Demand
(117) Jim Goldberg ~ Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2008"I took this picture last year, before Christmas, in a refugee camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was finishing up a six-year project on immigrants, refugees and trafficked people. This man is sitting on a rock overlooking the camp. To his right you can see around 50 huts; if you looked in the direction he is looking, you would see the other 90,000 people living there."
Labels: Best Shots
Martin Heidegger in 1961: Twenty-eight years earlier, the"How many scholarly stakes in the heart will we need before Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), still regarded by some as Germany's greatest 20th-century philosopher, reaches his final resting place as a prolific, provincial Nazi hack? Overrated in his prime, bizarrely venerated by acolytes even now, the pretentious old Black Forest babbler makes one wonder whether there's a university-press equivalent of wolfsbane, guaranteed to keep philosophical frauds at a distance."Romano becomes more derisive from there. Actually, his essay is entitled Heil Heidegger! - so he starts more derisively. His bottom line - which is that Heidegger and those people who sanitize and sidestep his explicit, enthusiastic Nazi politics deserve to be ridiculed not argued with - seems about right to me.
Labels: Heidegger, philosophy, Political Theory
"If no theoretical distinction has been made between the photograph as scientific evidence and the photograph as a means of communication, this has been not so much an oversight as a proposal.Not long ago I started a post with this remark from John Berger. It seems apt to me generally. It seems even more apt relative to the (project seven-part) series of posts that Errol Morris has begun on his blog at The New York Times. This appears to be evolving into another of those obsessive debates over whether photography is best understood as providing "evidence" and, if so, what difference it might make if the photographer has set the scene. This, of course, is meant to be a domain-defining exercise; at issue is whether there is such a thing as "documentary" photography that stands over against other genres, especially "art" photography. I think this distinction is more or less wholly unsustainable. Worse, it obstructs sensible thinking about photography and its uses. I've suggested why here. But Morris is addressing the truly sacred among defenders of this dichotomy - the FSA photographers of the 1930s. Documentary is, in the words of Walker Evans, a "style." It is a technology for communicating various things. And that means that it is not simply referential. To think otherwise is just plain ideology.
The proposal was (and is) that when something is visible, it is a fact, and that facts contain only the truth." ~ John Berger
Labels: Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, Errol Morris, Evans, FSA
Labels: Obituaries
"Jefferson ... knew, however dimly, that the Revolution, while it had given freedom to the people, had failed to provide a space where this freedom could be exercised." ~ Hannah Arendt
Labels: political economy, politics, social science
Bertrand Russell, 1949. Photograph © Jane Bown.Labels: fair use, Obama, Shepard Fairey
Labels: Galeano, interviews
Labels: Censorship, embedded, War
"If no theoretical distinction has been made between the photograph as scientific evidence and the photograph as a means of communication, this has been not so much an oversight as a proposal.
The proposal was (and is) that when something is visible, it is a fact, and that facts contain only the truth." ~ John Berger~~~~~~~~~~
Anti-abortion protesters near their van at a prayer vigil in“To those who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and injustice on the other, and that the fighting must go on, what matters is precisely who is killed and by whom. To an Israeli Jew, a photograph of a child torn apart in the attack on the Sbarro pizzeria in downtown Jerusalem is first of all a photograph of a Jewish child killed by a Palestinian suicide bomber. To a Palestinian, a photograph of a child torn apart by a tank round in Gaza is first of all a photograph of a Palestinian child killed by Israeli ordinance. To the militant, identity is everything. And all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions. During the fighting between Serbs and Croats at the beginning of the recent Balkan war, the same photographs of children killed in the shelling of a village were passed around at both Serb and Croat propaganda briefings. Alter the caption, and the children’s deaths could be used and reused.”I was reminded of that passage when I came across this story and this slide show/blog post that The New York Times ran last week on the ways some militant anti-abortion activists use photographic images. To the activists, apparently, the images speak for themselves. The protesters treat their gory images as "facts" and as embodying "truth" - as though that is clear to anyone with eyes to see. Except, of course, that the "explanatory" captions are needed here too. And here, too, causes can be ignored, context suppressed, numbers denied. The activists are not providing evidence, they are only proposing that what they show falls into that category; they nevertheless are testifying (and in that way seeking to communicate). But just what is it that they are saying? And to whom?
Labels: politics, Symbolic Politics
“The clarification was added to ensure that service members’ privacy and propriety are maintained in situations where media have unique and intimate access as embedded reporters,” [Master Sgt. Tom] Clementson [of Regional Command East Public Affairs] wrote by e-mail in response to questions. “While RC East does everything possible to accommodate an embedded reporters’ ability to cover the war in this region, there is also a command responsibility to account for the best interests of its service members.”So, the military brass describe what is effectively a reversal of policy as a "clarification." They neglect to mention that this new set of restrictions is much narrower than those currently in force elsewhere in Afghanistan. They, once again, hide behind the smoke screen of "privacy" despite the fact that military personnel are public agents enacting official government policy. And, of course, the really sweet part is that, having insisted that all press access be on their terms (everyone must be "embedded" and, so, comply with military ground rules) they now worry that the "media have unique and intimate access" to military operations. Come on! You guys can do better than that.
Labels: Censorship, embedded, War
Marti Friedlander, Paris 1972.Labels: self-portraits
"About 70,000 women die every year and many more suffer harm as a result of unsafe abortions in countries with restrictive laws on ending a pregnancy, according to a report.The deaths here are of real, live women - not embryos, fetuses, "unborn babies"; what ends in each case is not a "potential" life, but an actual one. The most obvious lesson is that prohibitions do not cut the rate of abortion. They simply insure that abortions are unsafe to women.The total number of abortions across the globe has fallen, the influential Guttmacher Institute says, but that drop relates only to legal abortions and is mostly the result of changes in eastern Europe.
There were 41.6m terminations worldwide in 2003, compared with 45.5m in 1995. But in 2003, says the report, 19.7m of these were unsafe, clandestine abortions. The numbers of those have hardly changed from 1995, when there were 19.9m.
Almost all the unsafe abortions were in less developed countries with restrictive abortion laws."
Labels: politics
Labels: political economy, Prizes
Labels: Obituaries