Salgado Before He Was A Superstar

This entry at the Lens blog (New York Times) on Sebastião Salgado is eye-opening both for what it reveals about his pre-superstar years and for the contrast it sets up with the many critics - think Susan Sontag, Ingrid Sischey, Michael Kimmelman, for starters - who are so incredibly dismissive of he, his motives, and his work.

Gezi Park - Reminders for Political Theorists

A couple of reports on Gezi Park that offer important reminders for political theorists. The first from the BBC addressed the uses of humor in politics. Here there is a paper by Elizabeth Spelman ("Anger the Diary") that contrasts the distinct impact of anger, which empowers the aggrieved, and humor, which deflates the pretensions of the powerful.  And, of course, this argument subverts the dichotomy between rationality and the emotions (see, generally, Amelie Rorty) - the connections between rationality and emotions are various.  The second - here - is from Michael Kimmelman at The New York Times who underscores (among other things) both Hannah Arendt's claim that the exercise of freedom presupposes public space and Jim Scott's quasi-anarchist arguments about resistance to regimentation of (among other things) space.

Truthful Imagas (4): Walker Evans Re-Printed

Walker Evans. "Untitled. Selma, Alabma (1936)"

Michael Kimmelman has an interesting review in The New York Times (25 August) of a show currently at the UBS Art Gallery (to which I cannot locate a link) in NYC. The show consists of digitized reproductions of classic Depression-era Evans originals. Kimmelman's review is entitled "Walker Evans. Or Is It?" and he raises interesting questions surrounding the technological reproduction of photographs. I must say that I find it difficult to get too exercised by such matters, but Kimmelman does note that the size differential between the originals and the reproductions surely influences the way we look at the images. He notes differences in contrast and so forth due to differences in the production processes. And, of course, he raises the obvious analogy to what we think when photojournalists engage in "any hanky-panky in the printing process" that might alter images in ways not too different from this process of digitization. The answer, I think, comes down to the uses to which we hope to put different sorts of image.

But Evans, according to Kimmelman, apparently was almost entirely uninterested in the printing process. And among top contemporary photographers it is possible to discern a range of attitudes to such matters - from Edward Burtynsky who seems preoccupied with production issues dictated by his large color images, to Sebastiao Salgado who has a production/layout team headed by his wife Leila, to Josef Koudelka who, I seem to recall, no longer bothers to print most of what he shoots at all (he is too busy shooting pictures to deal with such mundane things). So what precisely is at issue here?