To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged...to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing - including...another person's pain or misfortune.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography

~ Photo of genocide of Serbians during the Kosovo War; interestingly, this also brings up another phenomenon from this period (not over, is it? couldn't tell, could you?), what they are calling 'gendercide', that is the targeting of healthy males (reasonable tactic, I suppose, if you want to win, and are brutal enough to carry it out), and all of the resulting psychological and sociological damage that results, not to mention the desired effect of depleting the targeted population, now and for the future.

Photographing is essentially an act of non-intervention. Part of the horror...of contemporary photojournalism...comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and a life, to choose the photograph.

The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene.

Even if incompatible with intervention in a physical sense, using a camera is still a form of participation...the act of photographing is more than passive observing...it is a way of tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep happening.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography

~ Famous Photo of Vietnam War, used to propagandize the brutality of the Vietnamese, in fact an instance of personal vendetta against someone who had already killed the other man's family; interestingly, the blog where I found this also called journalism, 'churnalism'. Example of how photos can be used to angle a story the way the press (and those in power) wants it to be angled.

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers...Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged to gradually give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic.

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something.

Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.

This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography
~ Photo, Me, Dried Mud in Corrales, New Mexico

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism.

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography

...Photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing - which means that, like every mass art form,photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography
~ Photo, Arthur Rothstein, Car in a Duststorm, 1930s depression era

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity - and ubiquity - of the photographic record is photography's 'message', and its aggression.

Images which idealize...are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness...There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera.

~ Susan Sontag, On Photography
~ Photo, Equivalent series, Alfred Stieglitz

Mr. Vonnegut, We Hardly Knew Ye

I first became familiar with Kurt Vonnegut in high school, where I wrote an extensive in depth research paper on his work (as preparation, I read literally every one of his books published up to that point). I have only recently realized how profoundly Mr. Vonnegut and his work have influenced my life. Without any sort of conscious plan, some of his favorite authors have become mine (Mark Twain, Louis-Ferdinand Celine); some of his favorite books have become mine (Journey to the End of the Night - but not Huck Finn). For a long time, his philosophical and religious views became mine - and some still remain. I only discovered any of this recently, while reading one of his autobiographies titled, Palm Sunday. Now I know that this exceptional man has been a mentor and friend to me for over 20 years. And it all started with Slaughterhouse Five. Mr. Vonnegut, we miss you.

Here are some of the points from Palm Sunday I found most intriguing (paraphrased):

Writers are always awkward in the world.

The best solution for our modern society is tribal togetherness.

Cinderella is the Christian Creation Story revised.

In the Words of Buckminster Fuller

Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting.

If you have started from the bottom then you know by now that I am a complete geek - although I insist there should be a better word. If you are starting here, then, you know right away. Here's more ammo for you: I used to play Buckminster Fuller's world game in college - and I played it more than once. Apparently the houses pictured here were inspired by him. I've read people who think he was a genius and people who make fun of him because of his plucky goofiness and his conceptual 'dreamy' way of thinking. I wish more people had those kind of 'faults' paired with his kind of genius.

An Imaginary Life

In concept this is a very unusual book by David Malouf. The author takes complete liberty with what might have happened to the Roman poet OVID during his period of exile and unto his death. I don't recommend it to anyone who doesn't want to read pages (although it is short) of cerebral ponderings with little to no dialogue but, in a way, a lot of action. Here is some action about Fate:

We barely recognize the annunciation when it comes, declaring: Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise, since Fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.

More Vincent

It is difficult to leave a country until you have done something to prove that you have felt and loved it.

Success is about the worst thing that can happen.

~ Doesn't it often seem as if he is making excuses? And yet, I know exactly what he means.

More R.v.R.

Maniacs of the written word can always find something to disagree about.

[I had to] accept the world as God had made it, not as I thought that he ought to have made it or as I would have made it if I had been given the chance.

The most intelligent of men must be crazy on some one point to be really well-balanced and a useful member of society.

And finally, when the author's efforts at doctoring mankind had failed --

I had tried to benefit mankind...to the best of my ability. I had tried to be of some service to those who were less fortunate than I. And they had risen in their wrath and had destroyed me because I had dared to deprive them of what was dearer to them than life itself -- their misery.

~ With heartfelt thanks to Mr. Hendrick van Loon, a brilliant man in any age. And as all brilliant men - and women - must be, misunderstood by all but his closest friends.

The Life and Times of Rembrandt van Rijn

For the lonely pioneers who do the work the rest of us shirk ask for very little. They are willing to go hungry and to slave for mean wages and to be humiliated by those who in God's own good time, in a thousand different ways, won't be allowed to hold the stirrup of their horses.

~ From R.v.R. by a gentleman named van Loon, who claims to have been a contemporary of the famous Dutch Baroque artist, Rembrandt van Rijn. Rembrandt died a pauper, his work largely unappreciated in his time, and his lack of financial success due in no small part to his inability to do anything other than work on this art. That is, he was not a good business man. He never sacrificed his vision. As far as I know, he was buried in a unmarked grave. Though they may have made one up by now, for the tourists.

In the words of the Stinging Butterfly

The time has gone by when a man shall be born without being consulted.

~ James Whistler, American painter extraordinaire

Whistler was very much like Prince (he who shall not be named) in his day. He was very short, dressed very flamboyantly, and liked to wear high shoes. His signature consisted of a butterfly with the tail of a scorpion. When people tried to peg him for a Midwestern boy, he would say, 'I do not choose to be born there.' He was one of the pioneers of 'art for art's sake.' For a time, he was good friends with Oscar Wilde, who is thought to have stolen some of his quips.

In the words of Vincent

If only one can remember what one has seen, one is never alone.

There may be a fire within our soul, but no one comes to warm themselves at it; they only see the smoke as they are passing by --- and move on.

I am not an adventurer by choice but by Fate.

As long as there are men alive, the dead will live.

~ From the letters of Vincent Van Gogh

Truth be told, I am not a huge fan of Vincent or of his art, but he did have some wonderfully melancholy things to say and paint.