I see but a glimpse of New York City, a privileged visitor's wedge. Transitory. Now fast, now slow. Dispersed. Glitzy and not, layered, gritty and unfair.
With a few photographs and watercolours I evoke as an amateur what seems to me beautiful in a world of people and things, of places and memories. It would be safer to “essay” them, so to speak, to compose about them in writing. It’s easier to hide.
With images, I risk turning “experience” into what —in Susan Sontag's still ringing challenge— can slip into a cascade of possessive, reprehensibly selfish, modern moves. A “search for the photogenic,” a conversion of “experience into … image,” a stalking hunter’s “violation” of others.
And yet, at a moment when “the image” —photographic and quite otherwise— is even more ubiquitous (On Photography was published in 1977), there is this disarming, ragged, fragmentary beauty all about. Stories and suspectibilities to imagine, to broach, along with one's own, along with all that I want to say.
Pay no homage? Leave them be? Let them grow dim? I'm torn.
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Kenneth- Thanks for sharing these photo-journals of NYC. I particularly enjoyed the black-white contrasts of each image. Something about black-and-white photography just captures the spirit of the human condition in ways that color could not, I think?
Really nice!