• Alex Martinez does a feature for La Pura Vida, and it’s awesome of course.
• Dide, a well-done online photo magazine from Iran.
• John went to a private Araki opening and gives a good description of what that experience is like. Araki, by the way, is on fire these days. He put up an exhibit showing the death of his beloved cat, which I half-expected to be terrible, does that really sound like a good idea to anyone? But no, it was genuinely moving. His photos conveyed an honesty about himself, like the cosmic love he felt for this animal was entirely apparent, and in a strange way it said something about the way he looks at people as well. Araki is an interesting guy. (Meanwhile, I thought, Daido Moriyama’s latest book, “Nagisa,” which John reviewed here, could have been the work of a high school student who is just learning how to take pictures while at the same time really digging his girlfriend.)
• Some Hamburger Eyes style black and white work on ithoughtiwasalone. It’s been too long since they posted a gallery like this, although as a lazy blogger I can hardly point fingers.
• Stephen Shore for Urban Outfitters.

“The effects of critique are generally different from those that were intended.”

Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason

I don’t think I’ve made a secret of my affinity for academic thought. It bothers me when people shrug off philosophy and critical theory as an amusing pastime for waffly professors. Of course, there is a lot that the academy (and academic writing) leaves to be desired—“academic thought” and “philosophy” may hardly ever intersect, if at all. For every lucid comment one comes across there are bound to be twenty (fifty? a hundred?) that were not even intended to be understood in the first place, and—do I even need to say it?—not in a joyful, Nietzschean way. Sloterdijk, though, that guy is on to something.

With this in mind, here is a link to a new academic review called Trans Asia Photography Review. I want to look over it carefully and write more about it later, but for now I’d say that Geoffrey Batchen comes across as a very lucid person, and Christopher Pinney does not.

I’m back on a regular blogging schedule, I think, there should be at least one every weekday. Peacing out for the weekend. Going to Pat’s opening, and this Japanese surf rock guitarist.

I have started something which, when it’s finished, should give a material form to the things I have been thinking about and working on since I got here.

これは、秘密のプロジェクトのサンプル。

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