While VOX has long been associated with the socially grounded photographic work of documentary, they have adopted for this occasion a more inclusive sense of documentary’s mis sion and its means. Instead of just the prosaic tone of “straight” photography, we have more lyricism, fiction, uncertainty, speculation and aestheticism.
The commonplace that computer and communicational technologies have collapsed space should not be limited to the sense that they have contracted distance, but also that they overwhelm spatial division and compartments. This produces not only spatial dislocation (like the intimate cell-phone conversation held in the supermarket aisle) but also divisional collapse: as when a once-specialized space loses its dedicated purpose and becomes multi-faceted and multi-layered in its functioning. I’m thinking in particular of the tele-distanced, wired up, fully equipped and furnished oxymoronic “home office.” (It is a vestigial Marxist notion that new technologies are on the side of an emergent class.)
Nommer un nouveau phénomène signifie le rendre compréhensible en établissant un lien entre lui et quelque chose de connu, selon une ressemblance ou une analogie qui les unira pour toujours. Lorsque les premiers documentaristes français, réalisateurs de films touristiques et autres, ont qualifié leurs oeuvres de documentaires, ils revendiquaient pour leur travail le statut de document, à l’instar des enquêtes scientifiques ou des recherches juridiques qui nous renseignent sur notre monde.
Before he ultimately lost his battle with cancer in 1994, my father had lived for fourteen years with the consequences of a laryngectomy. This operation successfully prolonged his life, but left him disfigured with a hole at the base of his throat, a strange respiratory arrangement (he breathed and coughed through the stoma) and the loss of his voice.
Graham, Robert. (1994, March 24). Annie Liebovitz: Squint for effect. The Downtown Experience, Montreal.
Like the contemporary anthropologist, the Canadian photographer of Latin America maintains an existential straddle between what Clifford Geertz identified as the being there and the being here sides of the ethnographic divide, where there is the domain of the work of inquiry and here is the region of professional display and performance.
In this book, Guilbaut spatializes art history and develops a geo-aesthetics which gave to location an importance not only as the background source of art but also representing a strategic position in art. The ways in which art and artists are placed and circulated matter.
The young James Joyce has provided me with more than a title. His exuberant self-announcement in celebration of his being, and of his being seen, also contains an illuminating childish grammatical slip: misemploying the objective case. To shout joyfully, “Here I am – the object of your attention!” is to state precisely the ways in which the subject operates in the field of the Other. Or, as French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan characterized the discourse of Jean Piaget’s egocentric child, “a case of hail to the good listener!”
In the language of human (or time) geography, the life path of the war photographer marks a tense existence between inclusion and separation. Understood spatially, the activity of the photographer is located inside or outside demarcated zones which establish for the photographer and the work a position and a role. The photograph, and what we come to know of it, is the product of this activity and signals to us the conditions of its source moment.
As a character in the modern era, the collector is a mostly abused type. Widely dismissed psychologically as anal retentive, in terms of political economy portrayed as a hoarder and perhaps a manipulator of values, and in the circuit of creative production seen as the parasitic terminal figure who swallows all and returns no more than a belch.