For example, I was talking to someone at a gallery the other day, explaining what I was up to, and she was suddenly asked me, “Dan, how are you eating these days?” That’s the first question!! But it’s rare to hear (or read) such candor.

たとえば、先週ギャラリーで知り合いと話す時で、彼女が「えっ、ダンは、いまどうやって食べる？」を聞いた。それは、完璧な質問だと思います。

Thinking about out what interests me in art, or art criticism, and why so much of this is disappointing. Do we speak the same language?

「キャピタリズム」が聞いたら、全く目を止める。

だから、アートやアート批評はだいたいがっかりする。

誰が、同じ言葉話すの？

Conscientious talking about Kawada Kikuchi’s “The Map.”

Here is something else that is striking about The Map. Can you name a German photographer who has dealt with the past in the way Japanese photographers have? Maybe I’m missing something, but while Germany’s non-photographic artists have dealt with the German past, its photographers, curiously enough, for the most part have avoided the subject. This is all the more striking since Germany as a whole has made tremendous efforts to deal with its past – unlike Japan, whose prime ministers until very recently regularly visited a shrine honouring war criminals, but refused to even apologize for the country’s action during World War II.

Gotta give credit where credit is due, this is a lucid paragraph, perhaps the only one Colberg has ever written.

The post also features the following stomach-churning passage: “…when pressed, I elaborated on why The Map truly is a stellar book. Just as before, I was surprised about the stuff I heard myself say, and pleasantly so, if I may add. Son of a gun, I thought, that’s actually kind of interesting.“

Sigh. The most respected “online photo critic” (he still is, right? i’m not really that close to the ‘scene’) is a man who would happily find the words to praise the color and texture of his own vomit.

From this post about a Japanese photographer:

Fumi has the Japanese gift for simplicity. His toned black and white images of nature or Japanese artifacts and architecture have a quiet elegance that only someone who appreciates the world when it’s calm and still, interprets so beautifully.

Will try to/want to catalog more of this. Send over a link if something interesting pops up.

from Bryan on google reader

Quoting Herzog again, “It can sometimes be a struggle to find unprocessed and fresh images.” In light of these words, this video saddens me.

“I have often spoken of what I call the inadequate imagery of today’s civilization. I have the impression that the images that surround us today are worn out; they are abused and useless and exhausted. They are limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. When I look at the postcards in tourist shops and the images and advertisements that surround us in magazines or I turn on the television, or if I walk into a travel agency and see those huge posters with that same tedious image of the Grand Canyon on them, I truly feel there is something dangerous emerging here.

…As a race we have become aware of certain dangers that surround us. We comprehend, for example, that nuclear power is a real danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs. Look at the depiction of Jesus in our iconography, unchanged since the vanilla ice-cream kitsch of the Nazarene school of painting in the late nineteenth century. These images alone are sufficient proof that Christianity is moribund.

We need images in accordance with our civilization and our innermost conditioning, and this is the reason why I like any film that searches for new images no matter in what direction it moves or what story it tells. One must dig like an archaeologist and search our violated landscape to find anything new. It can sometimes be a struggle to find unprocessed and fresh images.”

-Werner Herzog, from Herzog on Herzog

stolen from some other blog, via miguel

• 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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