Notes on Photography, Poetry, a Better Good Life, and the Eternity of the Instant
— Let’s start this little ramble off with some notes and quotes on photography. (The photo in the header and the one below were both taken in this month of April in my city, Edmonton).
— One of my new favourite books is Sofia Samatar’s Opacity. She talks about the writer Mieko Kanai, “who wrote about an impossible photograph, a photograph-as-collection that could contain “all the fascination that the eternity of the instant holds.”
— Which reminds me of the book, Photographs Not Taken edited by Will Steacy. Which reminds me how much I hate talking about how lousy AI is because it is lousy but also because I’d rather just be talking about photography. But this is a kind of photography you can’t AI lol. From the intro: “…there are many kinds of missing pictures…(just as there are many shades of darkness). There are pictures that could not be taken, pictures that were prevented from being taken, pictures that were taken and failed, pictures that were almost taken but abandoned, pictures that might have been taken but were renounced…” Anyway, he goes on but you can read the book for more :)
— I take all my photographs these days on a Fujifilm XT4. Previously, I used a Nikon D610 but the weight of it is a lot so I haven’t picked it up in ages. When everyone was getting excited about Artemis II (and I was too!) the photographers were all talking about the photos and how they were made. Totally amazing that with all the choices they went with a Nikon D5! They also used a new iPhone but:
“the handheld, point-and-shoot nature of the phones were useful, their large file sizes posed a challenge.
“One thing we do have to think about onboard is what does it take to get files down?" Willoughby said. "And unfortunately, we don't have bandwidth. And that's something a lot of people down here are really used to instantly having."
— This was pretty timely for me because there is that urge when you look at a lot of photos, to start thinking, oh, if I had a better camera that wasn’t stuck together with duct tape, maybe my photos would be that good too. Anyway, advice I regularly give myself and sometimes even take is just to move my feet more. Look better, differently. Try something new. Or, just get out there, in all the weather, all the light. The eternity that the instant holds is endlessly worth exploring.
— This morning, as I was wishing I took better photos, I decided to just look at 20 photos I took from the last few months or so. Just isolating out what I thought were my best seemed to help a bit. So here they are below, and you should be able to click on each one if you’re viewing in your browser, if you want to see them at a larger scale, preferably on a computer. But does anyone look at anything except on a phone these days? :)
— You’ve probably heard the Robert Frank quotation a million times by now, but here it is again:
“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”
— I was asking myself, what have you done of worth yet today, and my answer, well you did dogear two new pages in your Tomas Tranströmer book. (Bright Scythe).
— One of the poems I marked is a prose poem, Madrigal, and it’s translated by Patty Crane:
“I inherited a dark forest where I seldom walk. But there will come a day when the dead and the living change places. Then the forest will be set into motion. We aren’t without hope. The most difficult crimes remain unsolved despite the efforts of many police. In the same way that somewhere in our lives there’s a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark forest but today I walk in another forest, the light one. Every living thing that sings wriggles sways and crawls! It’s spring and the air is intense. I have a degree from the university of oblivion and I’m as empty-handed as the shirt on the clothesline.”
— Another poem I read this week that I love is by Wendell Berry.
Shall we do without hope? Some days
there will be none. But now
to the dry and dead wood floor
they come again, the first
flowers of the year, the assembly
of the faithful, the beautiful,
wholly given to being.
And in this long season
of machines and mechanical will
there have been small human acts
of compassion, acts of care, work
flowerlike in selfless loveliness.
Leaving hope to the dark
and to a better day,
receive these beauties freely
given, and give thanks.
— I guess we’ve been raging against the machine and all the machines for some time now. Why wouldn’t we be? But still, Let’s “work flowerlike in selfless loveliness.”
— I keep returning to a phrase by the late Lauren Berlant where they talk about the image of a “better good life.” What would Berlant be making of this time I have to wonder. What a loss yes? They talk about “inventing life together.” What is our new ordinary now, I wonder, reading their work. Where are our optimisms now located? How to invent life together? What is working and how to detach from what is not working. What we have been doing at breakneck speed ever since the pandemic it seems to me, is adjusting, while yet in the unknowing. We are in a situation. Constantly.
— Berlant says, “As we know from situation comedy, a situation is a genre of living that one knows one’s in but that one has to find out about, a circumstance embedded in life but not in one’s control. A situation is a disturbance….It has a punctum, like a photograph; it forces one to take notice, to become interested in potential changes to ordinariness. When a situation unfolds, people try to maintain themselves in it until they figure out how to adjust.” And aint that just the truth.
— I keep thinking about various micro-traumas and our reactions to automations, for one thing. And the word traumation feels worth exploring to me. Traumautomation? We want to work flowerlike, but we’re given other. How to reconcile these things?
— Back to the Artemis II joy-bringers, tho. Christina Koch said this: “Planet Earth you are a crew.” And I’ve been asking myself why this hits me so well? Why do I love the idea of that? The Artemis astronauts are the crew to emulate hey? A book that meant a ton to me a few years back and still does is Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft. In it he asks, “How is being part of a crew different than being part of a “team” in the new mode of office work?” I can’t help wondering how the world would be different/better/ if it were Microsoft Crews instead of Microsoft Teams. Or how about Microsoft Flowers.
— Crawford says that “in most work that transpires in large organizations, one’s work is meaningless taken by itself. The individual feels that, alone, he is without any affect.” He talks about how on a team, it “depends on group dynamics, which are inherently unstable…” but “on a crew, skill becomes the basis for a circle of mutual regard…” There is a solidarity in a crew, he says, and a “positive attraction, akin to love.” There is a “regard for human excellence.”
— The world is different now but most people are just trying to be their flowerlike human selves.
— How to be alive in this world now when “the surfaces of the world are aesthetically uneven. You come around a bend in the road, and the world suddenly falls open…”(Elaine Scarry). But also, 2026, a lot of what we’re seeing is outside the aesthetic realm. It’s outside the aesthetic experience which can only be a human one.
— I try to mainly stay off LinkedIn these days but I was drawn in by some posts, once again about Artemis II and photography. This post by Nick Heller is great though. He says, “Imagine looking at a photo like this…made by humans…taken from a spaceship made by other humans…currently on a trip designed by human engineers and scientists…and then going back to a keyboard to type up another weak post about how amazing your generative AI prompts are at producing images.” And in the comments Christopher Johnson says, “From a semiotic point of view, part of the beauty of photographs is their indexicality: they are caused by the interaction between camera and subject. As a consequence of that, we can learn things about the world by looking at photographs. We can't learn anything about the world from a synthetically generated image. This general idea applies in some way to all forms of synthetic content, but is especially relevant to images.”
— Well, we have all lived a few flowers, to quote Helene Cixous.
— Let’s end with one last poem because sometimes at least there are yellow flowers that shine. There are many poems to read, so many left to write. Some of them just out of reach. Still, there are stars out there, glimmers…
TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER
translation by Patty Crane
April and Silence
Spring lies forsaken.
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side
without reflections.
The only thing that shines
are yellow flowers.
I am cradled in my shadow
like a fiddle
in its black case.
The only thing I want to say
glimmers out of reach
like the silver
at the pawnbroker’s.
— One very last thing, Rob’s show is opening soon in Banff. Speaking of flowers :)
