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THEORY - "The Indecisive Moment: Frank, Klein, and 'Stream-Of-Consciousness' Photography" THE INDECISIVE MOMENT: FRANK, KLEIN, AND 'STREAM-OF-CONSIOUSNESS' PHOTOGRAPHY By Gerry Badger "Frank … and Klein brought to the decade a feeling for its woes which, in retrospect, synthesizes it for us. There hovers in their work an oppressive sense of the odds against which people struggled, the dismal mood and chance of defeat that lowered the emotional horizon. This was all the more striking because of the general affluence of the period, underway shortly before the start of Frank's and Klein's major effort, in the great boom of 1955. These transplanted photographers found live and visual metaphors for the bleakness of this Cold War moment, and the deadness of the things in it. For those who remember the era, these photographic evocations of it have the keenest resonance; for those who came later, The Americans and New York offer a wondrous guide."

About Welcome to my site. Here you will find summaries of my work, videos to watch, papers to download, images to study and links to pursue. I have three areas of interest - photography, multimedia and politics. I am particularly concerned with (1) how documentary photography, photojournalism and satellite imaging visually enact our world; (2) how multimedia technologies are transforming the capacity of photography to tell stories about our hybrid world; and (3) how issues of identity and representation help structure international politics. A full CV/resume is available here. As professor of cultural and political geography at Durham University in the UK, I am associated with the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies. In 2009 I have a fellowship at Durham's Institute for Advanced Study to work on photographs from the Sudan archive for my 'Geopolitics and Visuality' project.

Frontline Club: Irme Schaber talks about Gerda Taro At last week's Photography event at the Frontline Club, Irme Schaber talked about the life and work of Gerda Taro. If you missed the event, here is your chance to watch the entire debate. Schaber is a writer and lecturer on the history of exile photography, photojournalism and print-media. She is also Taro's biographer and curator of the current exhibition at the Barbican. Next week, she will present and talk about a wide selection of Taro's work. Taro worked alongside Robert Capa, who was her photographic as well as romantic partner and the two collaborated closely. Her photographs were widely reproduced in the French press and incorporated the dynamic camera angles of New Vision photography as well as a physical and emotional closeness to her subject. While covering the crucial battle of Brunete in July 1937, Taro was struck by a tank and killed.

"The Passion of Walker Evans" By: Daniel Mark Epstein, New Criterion, March 1, 2000 America's infatuation with photography has thrived upon its easy accessibility. By 1903, the year Walker Evans was born, George Eastman had made the roll-film camera so cheap that soon no family reunion or Sunday picnic need ever lack a "photo artist" to immortalize it. Amateur camera societies and photo exhibitions sprang up in cities and towns from coast to coast. And while professionals like Alfred Stieglitz fought for "the serious recognition of photography as an additional medium of pictorial expression," arguing that the photographer's gift, like the painter's, was privileged vision, the larger public remained quite content with the belief that one person's photo was pretty much as good as another's.

THEORY: "Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory" Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory By: Alan Trachtenberg, Social Research, Saturday, March 22, 2008 "I don't know why a Replicant would collect photos - maybe they were like Rachel - they needed memories." In the role of the bounty hunter Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner, Harrison Ford utters these words with a bitter edge. Assigned to "terminate" the beautiful Rachel, an "android" especially menacing because she's almost (almost!) indistinguishable from a "real" person, Deckard lusts after her and wants to be sure she's human, not machine-made, before bedding her. Based on Phillip K. Dick's brilliant science fiction novel of 1968, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the film adds the bit of sentiment about collecting photographs to the otherwise unmitigated darkness of Phillip Dick's vision of a near future. The year is 2021, and by means of mechanical replication--the electric sheep of Dick's title--warm-blooded animal life has been all but totally replaced by replicants, copies or duplications of almost forgotten originals. Memories of real sheep and toads and living human flesh are struggling against the irresistible tide of a programmed second-order reality unburdened by personal or cultural memory.

The photograph, framed without margins and behind Plexiglas, is just under four and a half feet high by nearly nine and a half feet wide. Its title is A Lunch at the Belvedere, and it depicts an actual event that took place at the Hotel Belvedere in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum of 2004. The lunch was hosted by Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, whose guest of honor was the famous American financier-philanthropist George Soros. The diners, eleven men, sit facing the viewer--though none looks toward the camera--on the far side of a long table that runs the full width of the picture. (To take this in the viewer must begin his or her engagement with the work by standing ten or twelve feet back from it.) One has the impression that the lunch has not properly begun. For the most part the men are talking quietly with one another, and to the left a chic young woman, possibly a waitress, bends over the table as if serving or taking an order. The image is by far most arresting toward its center, where the elegant, dark-haired and mustached Musharraf is shown talking earnestly to Soros, while a third man, to Soros's left, listens in. And what is arresting is precisely the extraordinary accuracy, as it seems to one, of the depiction of an entire range of small-scale, unemphatic, but nevertheless intensely photogenic gestures, expressions, postures, and pieces of behavior: for example, the small-scale gesture--scarcely more than a tensing of the wrist--of Musharraf's partly open left hand as he makes his point; the downward cast of Soros's head and his inscrutable, almost sullen-seeming facial expression as he plays with something on the tablecloth with his left hand; and the diffident demeanor of the third man who sits with both elbows on the table and his hands clasped.

A website/blog which accompanies Fred Ritchin's book "After Photography". A very useful and considered piece of work.