Monthly Archives: March 2015

Photographic high tide

Yesterday we visited the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester (the town in which Betsy grew up) to see the exhibit Photography Atelier 21. The photographs themselves were pretty inspiring, and the presentation was stunning, but the ‘artist statements’ accompanying the images were the real revelation for me. I’ve previously limited my image of such statements to introducing the photographer, rather than contextualizing the images, and the new perspective started me thinking anew about several of my own photographic projects.

I especially admired the work by Dianne Schaefer and James Hunt, both of which used infrared digital cameras (Schaefer’s Blurb book The Light You Cannot See really eponomizes the medium and technique).

We’re planning to visit a couple of photographic exhibits in Paris in the next few days: Qu’est-ce que la photographie ? at Centre Pompidou and Florence Henri at Jeu de Paume, and anticipate further inspiration.

I’ve just snagged Why It Does Not Have To Be In Focus: Modern Photography Explained which looks like it will further enlarge my thinking about what I’m doing with photography.

a bit from March 2004

I found this grumble I’d written 11 years ago, as I followed links in the hypertext mentioned in the last post. Still find it relevant:

Innovation
at small liberal arts colleges
is all but dead
except for independently/externally funded efforts
and rogue actions.
Administrations have insulated themselves
behind a smokescreen of
‘strategic planning’
which privileges risk avoidance
in the name of ‘management’.
Add more deans,
institute performance reviews,
emphasize assessment of instructional objectives.
Distrust visionaries.
Reduce creativity and experimentation with unpredictable outcomes.
Recline upon past laurels.

Faugh.

mid-March, surrounded by snow

Every five years my Harvard class publishes a volume of Class Reports, and this year is the 50th. I sent a brief submission for the book and included a link to an expansion, a pretty elaborate hypertext document that I’ve been working on for the last couple of months. I have no idea if others will explore its labyrinthine wanderings, but somehow that matters less than that I’ve managed to piece together into quasicoherence all sorts of elements of what I’ve been doing and thinking about since 1965. Such things are never finished, and I keep going back to tuck in further links and add bits of text, so the document will continue to evolve. The Reunion itself in in late May, and [quite uncharacteristically] I’ve signed up to attend. I hope for something more than paunchy bonhomie with people I never knew back in the day, but many of those I did know are either dead or constitutionally averse to Reunions. We shall see…

Meanwhile, we’re about to depart for two weeks in France, one of them in Brittany. Many photos will doubtless ensue.