Posted: August 31st, 2007 | Filed under: books | No Comments »
It seems that the human mind is always looking for connections and patterns. While reading Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, a book that was recommended based on some photos that I took this summer, I came across the name Abelardo which made me think of Abelardo Morell. Morell teaches at the Mass. College of Art and earlier in The Mezzanine I recall wondering if the author lived in MA based on references to CVS and Papa Gino’s (a Web search suggests that he lives in Maine). Could the two know each other? Shortly after that I turned the book (Vintage Contemporaries edition) over to see that the author’s photo was taken by Abe Morell. What makes this even more interesting (to me at least) is that other people looking at the photos I took this summer often brought up Abe Morell for his photos of books (not necessarily in style, but in terms of subject matter) and Baker was suggested for his a style of writing that is all about making connections and observations of minutia.
Other Baker/Morell intersections:
Baker wrote the preface for Morell’s Book of Books
Morell image on the cover of The Size of Thoughts (paperback)
Apparently they used to be neighbors.
Posted: August 23rd, 2007 | Filed under: photography | No Comments »
Recently I was at a talk given by Richard Barnes when he was asked if there was anything he collected. The question was in response to a lot of his work being about archeology, museums and artifacts in general. His answer was that though he didn’t really collect anything he felt that, in a sense, all photographers were collectors.
While the practice of photography itself is collecting, a lot of photographers seem to be attracted to the collection of others as well. In the past few months (in addition to Barnes’ work) I have seen examples of it in the Hiroshi Sugimoto show at the de Young, Jason Fulford’s work at the Prelinger Library that appeared in Blindspot 35 and in Harper’s (May 2007), and Catherine Wagner’s work with items from the de Young’s collection (Re-classifying History) and the Baltimore Museum of Industry (A Narrative History of the Light Bulb).
What makes collecting interesting is that looking at a collection gives you an idea of what that person or culture finds important. I was thinking of using the phrase “gives value to”, but that pulls in monetary and the best collections are put together for the love of the thing collected without any thought to its monetary value. At various different points I have collected stamps, coin, baseball cards, comic books, match books, and other bits of ephemera. My interests tend to shift a bit. Now I photograph and I find that in photography I have the same shifting interests and it’s a continual struggle to Find the Subject. I guess that is part of the reason I am starting this blog, as a way to work through my various interests and, by putting them into words, find the thread that connects them.