What can one do with beauty after the eye of the camera has clicked? It is eight days since we arrived and as yet I can invest no emotional quality to the brilliant unblinking panorama beyond the window. It is as unreal as celluloid, until I actually bend down and scratch my fingers on a thorn of a cactus. One must find fertile soil in the imagination in which to send down roots; nothing can be taken for granted until it is credibly set off against a familiar theme. This is the paradox of age and reason. In childhood it is different; there are flexibilities and infinite potentialities; then one can accept the authenticity of the unfamiliar with unclouded innocence and grapple to oneself the rounded and the shining, like bright toys; then quickly begin the cocoon of tradition.

- Isobel English, Every Eye, 1956

When summer begins, I become sad. It would seem that the luminosity, even if it is acrid, of summer hours should delight someone who doesn’t know who he is. But it doesn’t, it doesn’t delight me. There is too sharp a contrast between external life, which overflows, and what I feel and think, without knowing how to feel or think — the perennially unburied body of my sensations.

Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

S. Prairie Ave in Bronzeville - photo by Micah Marty

I picked up this enormous book from the 6th floor of the Harold Washington Library last week called City 2000. There are a lot of photography books on that floor, the Social Science and History Division of the library, because obviously, photography sits on the fence between art and documentation: One man’s portrait is another man’s photojournalism… and it can often be the same man.

Anyway, this book is just what I’m interested in right now, Chicago-based photography. The strange thing about living in Chicago is that on a national scale Chicago seems to be ignored in a large part, overshadowed by N.Y. and L.A. and other smaller cities that have interesting scenes. The things that are distinctly Chicago in nature can often produce an aesthetic not unlike that of New York, especially in street photography and architectural photography. The two cities look a lot alike in the brick.

City 2000 was a project executed in the year 2000 (the year of all-Flash websites) to document Chicago at that point in history by some of its notable photographers. There are 199 photographs in the book by 39 photographers. There’s also text provided by 15 authors regarding the project and regarding the city. The corresponding archive on UIC’s library website includes work from over 200 photographers that participated in the project, including some audio and video files, that documents every neighborhood in Chicago in some way (use the search field to find places that interest you!). That’s where I was able to find a copy of this photo, which serves as a cover to the book.

I love this photo by Micah Marty, because it captures something I wanted to capture about the South Side of Chicago - those open spaces next to buildings that were clearly built for compact architecture. Three-flats like this are usually seen built into a neatly-packed row of three-flats with small gangways in between each building, and that kind of neighborhood justifies their narrow layouts and cramped bedrooms (that often barely fit a bed). But take away that context and you happen upon this stark scene — the drastic lines of the residence demand your attention, and you can’t help but kind of daydream about what goes on in the empty lot on the corner. Often there are foot paths carved into the grass that you can see from the elevated train, people wearing away the grass to make the walk around the corner less square.

right to left: The "gloomily sooty" Monadnock building, the Fisher Building reflected, Metropolitan Correctional Facility

“Like the difference between Communion and communion, between obligatory ritual and the experience of oneness, there is a vast distinction: there’s standing in front of the Monadnock with Bach’s book, and then there’s coming up from the subway to find the Monadnock on your left, gloomily sooty and magnificent.”

Peter Bacon Hales in his introductory essay to Bob Thall’s The Perfect City

Marlaina Read was kind enough to include me in the first issue of her new online publication. Noel’s in there too.

Download the premiere issue of INVISIBLE CITY at http://www.invisiblecity.org

Contributors: Marlaina Read Alexander Binder Aaron McElroy Olivia Locher Noel Ruiz Alejandro Cartagena Michael Scaringe Kristen Heldmann Benjamin Reich Carey Macarthur Chih-Han Hsu Jason Reed Jordan Tate Daniel Farnum Susanne Willuhn Grace Kim Bruno Roels Aaron Joel Santos Carlo Dulla Stephen Donnelly Andrew P. Marcinek Nicola Trethowan Vladimir Zykov M Kitchell Kris T Kahn

From Bookslut:

A while back I was left in charge of my nephew, who was being fussy. I was exhausted, and tried singing the song that was echoing in my head to the boy: “I am tired, I am weary, I could sleep for a thousand years.” It wasn’t until I hit the first verse that I realized I was singing “Venus in Furs” to a three-month-old.

I know no pleasure like that of books, yet I read very little. Books are the entryway to dreams, but people at ease in life don’t need such introduction to enter into conversation with dreams. I could never read a book and give myself over to it; always, with each step, the commentary of my intellect or my imagination interrupts the narrative sequence. After some minutes I am the one who writes and the writing is nowhere to be seen.

Bernardo Soares, Assistant Bookkeeper in the City of Lisbon

One of my favorite bloggers, Kate Miss, and one of my new favorite photographers and bloggers, Lane Collins, both unexpectedly wrote lovely blog posts about receiving my mailing list photos. In addition to being talented artists and an excellent source of visual material, these two are just so nice and genuine. It makes my heart all warm to be a part of their good taste!

Photo from the totally awesome and thorough site of Eggleston Trust that I learned about thanks to Jeremy Okai Davis.

Harmony Korine interviews William Eggleston:

HK: What about digital photography?

WE: Don’t know anything about it.

HK: Have you ever shot with a digital camera?

WE: As I said, I don’t know anything about it. I don’t know, I might love it.

HK: You’re not opposed to it?

WE: There’s plenty of film out there, and quadrillions of cameras that use film-I don’t think it makes much sense not to use it. The thing that’s going out is the manufacturing of the paper. Incidentally, all these years my wife has told me that I’m color-blind.

HK: You’re color-blind?

WE: Yes.

I will not refrain from setting among these precepts a new device for consideration which, although it may appear trivial and almost ludicrous, is nevertheless of great utility in arousing the mind to various inventions. And this is, that if you look at any walls spotted with various stains, or with a mixture of different kinds of stones, if you are about to invent some scene you will be able to see in it a resemblance to various different landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and various groups of hills. You will also be able to see divers combats and figures in quick movement, and strange expressions of faces, and outlandish costumes, and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate and well conceived forms. With such walls and blends of different stones it comes about as it does with the sound of bells, in whose clanging you may discover every name and word that you can imagine.

To the extent photography is often thought of as a violation - as more intrinsically exploitative than other mediums - family pictures hold the artist more accountable than any other subject imaginable; at the same time, much more is at stake.

Photographing one’s own family is always more treacherous than photographing anyone else. We never just walk away from our families as we do from most of our other photographic subjects. Would many families let an outsider penetrate the security of domestic privacy? Will a photographer’s pictures of her children inadvertently burden the children when the pictures become part of our public culture? Will a child’s or parent’s feelings about the images conflict with the art maker’s ambitions?

Tom Bamberger writing in Blood Relatives: the family in contemporary photography

The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell. The effect in space of two different human individuals can be as different as the effect of a candle and an electric light bulb. Therefore the painter must be as concerned with the air surrounding his subject as with that subject itself. It is through observation and perception of atmosphere that he can register the feeling that he wishes his painting to give out.

Lucian Freud, 1954

A hand laid on the shoulder or limb of another body is no longer part of the body to which it properly belongs: something new has been formed from it and the object it touches or holds, something which was not there before, which is nameless and belongs to no one; and it is this thing with clearly defined limits which now becomes the subject of our attention.

Rainer Maria Rilke writing about Rodin