Anodyne
Monday, December 05, 2005
 

Or to approach the problem from a slightly different angle, consider Harold Bloom's notion of the "anxiety of influence." The cumulative impact of all those collections of black and white photography in the side office -- Atget; Hill & Adamson; Winogrand; Evans; the Bechers; Friedlander; Fox Talbot; Julia Margaret Cameron; Nadar & etc. -- could only result in sweats and shaky hands. It's just like the Web, in miniature! Any approach I could conceive of has already been anticipated, and thoroughly explored with more panache than I could ever hope to bring to the proceedings.

(For the record, conceptual art feels similarly overdetermined to me, largely due to the plethora of catalogs raisonne and retrospectives pouring in over the transom, which make the movement transparent to me in ways that it probably wasn't to those artists lucky enough to experience it firsthand).

Color photography, on the other hand, particularly digital color photography, still seems open-ended enough to work with. That Evans Polaroids catalog really feels like the dictionary: an embarrassment of riches, just waiting to be picked up and transformed. And like Baudelaire says (cranky old Baudelaire, who hated photography so profoundly that his criticisms of it remain truly up-to-date) the world is a dictionary too.

(Image: Henry Peach Robinson, When the Day's Work is Done, 1877. Albumen print from six negatives)
- posted by cjb @ 9:12 AM


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