With sadness, I would like to mark the passing of Aveek Sen, a writer who leaves behind a body of work that may be scattered in its places of publication (newspaper columns for the The Telegraph, catalog essays, assorted blog posts) but not at all in its style, clarity and verve. I am leaving a few links here to some of Aveek’s writing, and will update the post over time.

“Divinely Bovine – Indian cows and the pace of history” ¹

“What We Talk about When We Talk about Photography,” ² columns for Fotomuseum Winterthur

“What Father Knew” ³

Here’s some of the best advice I’ve received in the past few years. It went something like this:

The day you hand in your dissertation, you will think to yourself, “that was really not so hard!” At that moment, you will completely forget how miserable you were the previous year. The reason why you will think this is because the dissertation is not about figuring out the content, it’s about the confrontation with yourself.

Amy Sillman on Delacroix ¹

Gender & Society Releases Statement on Hoax Paper: ‘We are even more confident in our review process.’ ²

Pankaj Mishra, The Mask it Wears ³

Travis Diehl, ‘Made in L.A. 2018’: Widely Inclusive and Brimming with Community Spirit, But Is It Too Earnest? ⁴

Momtaza Mehri, Theorems of Separation ⁵

Wesley Morris, Cliff Huxtable Was Bill Cosby’s Sickest Joke ⁶

Momtaza Mehri, On Noise & Networks ⁷

KaoRI, Are You Sure Your Knowledge Is Correct? ⁸

Iizawa Kotaro, A killer blow to Araki’s career? ⁹

Anna Khachiyan, Art Won’t Save Us ¹⁰

Natalia Cecire, New at This ¹¹

Drew Austin, The Constant Consumer ¹²

Sarah Brouillette, I’ll kiss your hand if you kiss my ass ¹³

Devereaux Peters, I’m a WNBA player. Men won’t stop challenging me to play one-on-one. ¹⁴

Gustavo Arellano, We all live in Jonathan Gold’s Southern California ¹⁵

Caille Millner, Too expensive or too cheap — a new burger, but at what cost? ¹⁶

As anybody having even briefly studied the history of photography will know by now, the mechanical technology of producing still images as a discursive, cognitive, and epistemological field is probably more contradictory than even the fields of painting and sculpture have ever been.

Pretty much.

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Allan Sekula, or What Is Photography?,” Grey Room (April 1, 2014): 119, https://doi.org/10.1162/GREY_a_00139.

For Evans discovered—and it has the force of an invention in photography—that the literal point of view of a photograph, where the camera stands during the making of a picture, can be so treated in an extended sequence or discourse as to become an intentional vehicle or embodiment of a cumulative point of view, a perspective of mind, of imagination, of moral judgment.

Trachtenberg, Alan. “A Book Nearly Anonymous.” In Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans, 1st ed. New York, N.Y.: Hill and Wang, 1989, 250.

He’s writing about Evans’ American Photographs. I might not take a thought like this in the direction of “moral judgment,” but to point to “the literal point of view of a photograph, where the camera stands during the making of a picture” as always and already a choice that can be criticized as such strikes me as a very good thing. I’m pretty sure I talked about this in a short essay on Kitai Kazuo that now seems to have disappeared from the internet, for better or for worse.

“The Jolt”

We are beside ourselves. The glance wavers, with it, what it held. External things are no longer usual, displace themselves. Something has become too light here, goes to and fro.

Bloch, Ernst. Heritage of Our Times. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, 1991, 189.

Later on, at the Museo Rufino Tamayo, which displays Tamayo’s collection of prehispanic objects with minimal text. This time I thought it worked well, because there’s a clear explanation of why that choice was made, i.e. to argue for the significance of this work as capital A art. That project has its own set of complications, but the experience of looking at the collection worked for me in a way that the Iturbide show did not. I imagine a material culture scholar might have been hopping mad, though.

I thought about bodies as vessels.

After walking around the building, sitting by the waterfall up the hill behind it, and strolling through the town, I went back in to see the Graciela Iturbide exhibition that was up. Apart from my desire to travel outside of Oaxaca to find quiet places, this show was a major reason to come to San Agustín. Iturbide is a photographer I’ve known about for some time, but without knowing much more than her famous photographs, like Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas, Juchitán ¹, 1979.

The exhibition as a whole did not offer the kind of in-depth exploration of her work that I had hoped it might provide. Or, rather, it displayed a wide range of her work, but without any guidance about how it might be grasped. I didn’t take a photo that really shows the installation, but even from the image above you can maybe see that there were no labels on the walls. This meant that images from all across Iturbide’s career were put together without any indication of what year they were taken, let alone the title of the photograph. I’d be very curious to know how this decision was made. Does Iturbide want visitors to interact with her work as a series of formal images, floating (as it were) in a space without any context? It’s an odd choice, though I could say it did have the merit of forcing certain questions about her work to present themselves very directly.

For example: what was her relationship to Manuel Álvarez Bravo? I gather that she was his assistant, but I’d be curious to know more about their dialogue. Here, she’s clearly putting one over on him ².

But then other questions emerge. Why was she in India, anyway? What city is this? When was this trip taken? And, going further, what is her interest in the body?

Iturbide photographed an all-male wrestling gym of some sort, and a person going through a transition. She attends carefully to the way that light falls on the body—as if the caress of light on skin were inviting us, too, to a tactile experience.

And then, two very noteworthy photographs, in which trees (or cacti? I can’t tell exactly) appear as bodies in need of care. Perhaps here, finally, my historian’s desire for date and place fades away.

Emotions are cats. Thoughts are flies.

(I deleted the Twitter app off of my phone, and moved WordPress to the home screen.)

“The pictorialist juggernaut, while legitimating photography as a ‘fine art,’ was by 1910 all dressed up with no place to go. But in the Soviet Union, in Germany, among the Surrealists, and even a short walk away at the new Museum of Modem Art, photography was unproblematically assimilated as simply another medium in which artists might choose to work. On the walls of 291, the Intimate Gallery, and finally, An American Place, photography was always treated separately; it might have parity with the traditional arts, but remained always ghettoized. The legacy of this separation is with us still; art photography and artists’ use of photography have developed on separate tracks.”

Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. “Back to Basics: The Return of Alfred Stieglitz.” Afterimage 12, no. 1 (Summer 1984): 21–25, 25.