Long Sunday

War portraiture

Terror Town | The Duct Tape Guys | Sovereign Authority

.. face down, face up to, facing off, losing face, prima facie, saving face ...

Against Hebetude

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the death of the writer Italo Calvino.  Particularly fitting for this place (or for these 'places') is a short story about photography, one that I think many here will find interesting.  In any case, I certainly do.  It comes kind courtesy of wood s lot and begins:

WHEN SPRING comes, the city’s inhabitants, by the hundreds of     thousands, go out on Sundays with leather cases over their shoulders. And they photograph one another.  They come back as happy as hunters with bulging game bags; they spend days waiting, with sweet anxiety, to see the developed pictures (anxiety to which some add the subtle pleasure of alchemistic manipulations in the darkroom, forbidding any intrusion by members of the family, relishing the acid smell that is harsh to the nostrils).  It is only when they have the photos before their eyes that they seem to take tangible possession of the day they spent, only then that the mountain stream, the movement of the child with his pail, the glint of the sun on the wife’s legs take on the irrevocability of what has been and can no longer be doubted.  Everything else can drown in the unreliable shadow of  memory...(read the rest)

Penguins: Hopping Across the Frozen Bathos

“For we shall have to ask ourselves, inevitably, what happens to the fraternity of brothers when an animal enters the scene.”

–Jacques Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I am (More to Follow)”

You can imagine the shock the world felt–if kept silent–when for once the Americans took something that was French and made it better.  Thankfully though, there are still some people trying desperately to fuck it up:

Law and Disorder/Looking Backward

Oh, radio...Following on from here, and for all you libertarians out there, a fascinating discussion of surveillance cameras from WBAI.  (Who are the real paranoiacs, those thinking and talking about the implications of public surveillance, or those putting the cameras there in the first place?)  It's an hour long mp3, but worth it.

Update:  If you'll permit me a lengthy side note, I thought I'd share some excerpts from an essay John Berger wrote in response to Susan Sontag's book On Photography.  It seems rather pertinent.

Update II:  See also this issue of Surveillance and Society (courtesy of wood s lot).

Dorothea Lange

An arresting photograph collection, courtesy of the honorable s lot, who also links this week to several enticing articles well deserving of a more patient blog post sooner or later.  Does anyone have suggestions for an image to join the rotation in our header (this blog aspires, after all, to radical democracy).  Anyway if so please do be sure to suggest how your image may gloss our title (and group statements).