November 2006
- 10
Manual Reminiscence
In my teenage years, I read Amateur Photographer every week. It was a Saturday morning rendezvous at the local library, where they only had a limited selection of photography books. My sister was a fan of Canon SLRs, and I decided I disliked their multi-function complexity. I remember one AP article describing Henri Cartier-Bresson, stalking Paris with a battered Leica hidden in a leather jacket. I liked his work, I liked his style; I decided…
- 16
Jazz
I go through musical phases where I play different kinds of music at different times, and when I play nothing. For the last year or two I’ve been playing jazz more than any other form, and I find it the most soothing and consoling music there is – even more than Bach or Handel. With rock music, I usually find I can only play it in limited quantities before it starts to feel enervating, whereas…
- 21
Photography: A Strange Confined Space
The explosive energies compressed in a photograph, encouraging the viewer to puzzle out is literal and conceptual contents, are like the unconscious energies Freud describes as emerging in a joke or a dream. The release achieved by comprehension of joke, dream, or metaphor is satisfying: in the Freudian joke because repressed ideas, which have gathered strength from their repression, are discharged or re-aligned with revelation of meaning. The very closure of a photographic frame compresses…