Quick!
Go see Charlie Rose interview photographer Taryn Simon. It’s free for just a bit longer. (Or you can “buy” it for less than one American dollar.)
She talks about her new project/book, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar and The Innocents project. Okay, it’s not a great interview, but I like […]

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I was very happy to learn from the State of the Art blog that Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts will have it’s first gallery dedicated to photography. Until now it’s been in the low-rent district with the “Works on Paper.” That’s not to say that they’ll put it in the finer part of […]

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My long-time friend and the most academically accomplished person that I know — who wishes to remain nominally pseudonymous but whose quirky pseudonym I just can’t bring myself to use — sent me the following interview questions.
1. What’s it like to be a photographer sans depth perception? Do you think such vision helps […]

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John Backus, the Turing Award-winning inventor of FORTRAN — arguably the world’s first high-level programming language — has died at age 82.
A lot of programs of a certain age started their careers with Fortran. I am just a young’un compared to those guys, who had to write programs on punched cards and walk uphill […]

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Sorry to be so absent recently. I have been engaged in a Talmudic examination of a fictious library system for my Software Development Methodologies class. I mentioned before that preparing for SDM class was a bit like studying Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, which above all distinguishes between this and that and categorizes knowledge […]

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It’s a crazy time here at The Metrowest Homeopathic Imaging and File Rehabilitation Center — the little office that Doctors Color, Compression, and FFT share with me, Doctor Format. Doctor Compression is happy to have most of the litigation behind him but still feels a bit crunched; FFT (”Fast” to his friends) is moving […]

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Richard Misrach - Stranded Rowboat, Salton Sea (1983)
No time to write seriously about anything. No time even for complete sentences. . . .
But I thought y’all might be vaguely interested in a short note about the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of landscape photography. I give you people’s exhibit A: Between Home and Heaven: Contemporary Landscape […]

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I hate The Family Circus (antithesis) but I love the works of Nietzsche (thesis). Oh what a tasty synthesis is the Nietzsche Family Circus random image generator! (From The Online Photographer.)

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The hyperbolic, carefully controlled, museum- and gallery-specific versions of photography, in which every prop and gesture can be attributed to the artist’s direction, have been the most pronounced arrivals in the art world. If you are, like me, schooled in the magic of photography’s willful embrace of luck, mistakes, and happenstance, you view the art […]

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A couple images from my recent trip to California.

Salvation Mountain (2007)

Alex at Salvation Mountain (2007) - after Rineke Dijkstra

Bombay Beach, California (2007)

North Shore, California (2007)

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It may be enough to know that, in theory-drunk circles of the period [the late 70s and early 80s], any sort of aesthetic appeal could be regarded as a stratagem of “late capitalist” ideology or some other wrinkle of malign social power. (The enemy’s identity was never entirely clear.) Artists were obliged to signal knowingness […]

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