J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivered a great commencement address last week at Harvard University entitled, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.”

If you haven’t already, see it, hear it, or read it here.

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Charles Leadbeater, a researcher at the London think tank Demos, is raising a lot of interesting questions about sharing ideas and the role of the internet. (Along with the above video, also see his TED talk on collaborative innovation and the “rise of the amateur professional” and, if you have the time, read the first three chapters of his book, We Think.)

Lately I’ve been considering how this all affects photographers and bloggers and would love to host some conversation on the topic here.

Share your thoughts (because you can?)!

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T: 1930, 1940, 1950 B: 1960, 1970, 1980
© Pelican / Things Magazine

I’m not sure where I saw this first, so I’ll just link to the original source. Things Magazine presents the Pelican Project – an archive of covers of Pelican (now Penguin) books from the 1930s to the 1980s.

What a great image of the evolution of graphic design and typography. And it’s interesting to see the visual unity within each of the decades.

The ‘70s were golden.

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I had planned to spend a portion of my “winter break” reading a few of the books that have been sitting next to my bed for the last month or two – you know, the books that patiently wait their turn to be read but are often neglected due to school work. Well, unfortunately for those books, I received a Christmas gift that is either the greatest collection of essays ever or a total waste of time (depending on how you look at it). I like to think it’s the greatest collection of essays ever.

Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing opens with an preface by William Irwin that asks, “how can philosophy, the discipline which is ‘a more or less general theory of everything’ deal with a show which claims to be ‘about nothing’?” Well, as he puts it, “everything and nothing are sometimes not so far apart.”

Thirteen Seinfeld fans (who happen to be professional philosophers) examine the ideas, the stories, the jokes, and the characters. Each chapter is an extended academic style essay that manages to be both dense enough for those familiar with philosophy and accessible enough for the average fan to read.

How is Jerry like Socrates? Is it rational for George to “do the opposite?” Would Simone de Beauvoir say that Elaine is a feminist? Is Kramer stuck in Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage?

Seinfeld and Philosophy is both an enlightening look at the most popular sitcom of the decade and an entertaining introduction to philosophy via Seinfeld’s plots and characters. These fourteen essays, which explore the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Lao-Tzu, Heidegger, Kant, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Wittgenstein, will show readers how to be masters of their philosophical domain.

Seinfeld and Philosophy is just Vol. 1 in a series of “Popular Culture and Philosophy” books published by Open Court. I already know it’s my favorite, though.

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Milan Cathedral, Milan, 1998 (detail)
© Thomas Struth

In The Politics of God – an essay adapted from his new book, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West – Mark Lilla considers the power of political theology. In this, his ability to present the history of theological politics up to the present day, in plain language, is masterful.

The full essay, as printed in the the latest New York Times Magazine, can be read online here. The article is lengthy but worth the read.

Additionally, I thought Thomas Struth’s images were an interesting compliment to the text.

Read this in print if you can.

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A Field Guide to the North American Family
© Garth Risk Hallberg

A Field Guide to the North American Family, a novella by Garth Risk Hallberg, “tracks two families through the wilderness of modern life.” The story unfolds in 63 seperate entries, each with a chapter of text and then a visual artist’s response to the entry’s title. The book will be lavishly designed and printed by Mark Batty Publisher, an art and design press based in New York.

I had posted previously about a call for entries for each of the chapters of the book and the great repsponse that the project was getting from photographers. I got news from Garth yesterday that two of my images were selected for the print publication. According to his e-mail, there were 700 submissions from more than 100 artists. He also writes to all contributors:

Frankly, I have been moved by the spirit in which everyone has participated in this project. It’s taught me a lot as an artist, and reminded me of why we do this stuff in the first place. I hope that your generosity and enthusiasm return to you tenfold.

I’m very happy to have been chosen to be a part of Garth’s book along with a great selection of other photographers and friends (tentative list):

Jordan Alport, Timothy Briner, Jessica Bruah, Kara Canal, Sandy Carson, Alana Celii, Janice Clark, Jason Curtis, John Paul Davis, Chris Eichler, Amy Elkins, Jason Falchook, Elizabeth Fleming, Catherine Gass, Hans Gindlesberger, Andres Gonzalez, Maury Gortemiller, Jonathan Gitelson, Jennifer Greenburg, Ben Huff, Christy Karpinski, Mickey Kerr, Liz Kuball, Michael Kwiecinski, Shane Lavalette, Jason Lazarus, Stacy Arezou Mehrfar, Nick Meyer, Matt Nighswander, Alexis Pike, Colleen Plumb, Gus Powell, John Putnam, Shawn Records, Rebecca Blume Rothman, Christopher D Salyers, Matthew Schenning, David Shulman, Kevin Sisemore, Brandon Sorg, Brian Sorg, Sai Sriskandarajah, Tema Stauffer, JJ Sulin, Brian Ulrich, Consider Vosu, Grant Willing.

I’m sure the book will be available through either the publisher, official website or, alternatively, you can pre-order a copy through Amazon.

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A Field Guide to the North American Family
© Garth Risk Hallberg

It’s all about family lately. Just a few days ago I recieved an e-mail from Garth Risk Hallberg which was inviting me to participate in what seems to be an ambitious book project planned to be complete by early March. The book promises to be lavishly designed and printed by Mark Batty Publisher, an art and design press based in New York.

A Field Guide to the North American Family, a novella by Mr. Hallberg, “tracks two families through the wilderness of modern life.” The story unfolds in 63 seperate entries, each with a chapter of text and then a visual artist’s response to the entry’s title (Adolescence, Adulthood, Family Values, and so on). On the official website, artists are provided with the 63 chapter titles as ‘tags’ where one can upload images and tag them as one sees fit. Already, there is a great list of contributors.

If your work speaks about family, home, or other themes that would be relevant to this publication, submitting would a nice way to contextualize the images and participate in an interesting collaborative project.

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One thing us bloggers like to avoid is repetition, writing a new post that includes the same information already mentioned elsewhere. It’s taboo.

But, this time I just couldn’t help myself.

While reading Michael David Murphy’s 2point8, I came across this post in which Michael shared a short short story (from Short Short Stories) by Dave Eggers in relation to his previous posts about good writing on photography:

Woman Waiting to Take a Photograph
by Dave Eggers

The woman is a young woman. She wants to make a living as a photographer, but at the moment she is temping at a company that publishes books about wetlands preservation. On her days off she takes pictures, and today she is sitting in her car, across the street from a small grocery store called The Go-Getters Market. The store is located in a very poor neighbourhood: the windows are barred and at night a roll-down steel door covers the storefront. The woman thus finds the name Go-Getters an interesting one, because it is clear that the customers of the market are anything but. They are drunkards and prostitutes and transients, and the young photographer thinks that if she can get the right picture of some of these people entering the store, she will make a picture that would be considered trenchant, or even poignant – either way the product of a sharp and observant eye. So she sits in her Toyota Camry, which her parents gave her because it was four years old and they wanted something new, and she waits for the right poor person to enter or leave the store. She has her window closed, but will open it when the right person appears, and then shoot that person under the sign that says Go-Getters. This, for the viewer of her photograph when it is displayed – first in a gallery, then in the hallway of a collector, and later in a museum when she has her retrospective – will prove that she, the photographer, has a good eye for the inequities and injustices of life, for hypocrisy and the exploitation of the underclass.

I, too, am often in search of these “good” texts on photography. Michael mentioned that he would use Eggers’ story as a first handout to his class, be it a writing or photography course. How do I enroll?

A relatively recent book that hasn’t made it’s way on to my own blog is The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer.

“The Ongoing Moment,” 2005
© Geoff Dyer

Mr. Dyer writes about photography, for the most part American photography, as practiced by a handful of masters and contemporaries. It is not a book for beginners; it assumes not only some knowledge of the history of American photography—the famous photographers and what sort of pictures they have taken—but also access to the many photographs that Dyer talks about but does not reproduce. Nonetheless, it’s worth picking up for future reference if you aren’t already photo-literate.

The New Yorker says about the book:

A self-styled “scholarly gatecrasher,” Dyer has written with equal fervor about D. H. Lawrence, military history, and jazz. Here he turns to photography, with the caveat “I make no claim to being an expert in this or any other field.” Indeed, he confesses, “I don’t even own a camera.” The resulting book is a curious encyclopedia, purposefully eclectic and incomplete. The images are taken mostly from the canon of American twentieth-century photography, but Dyer arranges them in unexpected clusters—blind accordionists here, vacant benches there. He imagines William Eggleston’s pictures to be the work of a Martian, stranded in Middle America, who keeps looking for his lost ticket home, “with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation.” The Martian is an apt stand-in for Dyer, a flâneur in the world of photography, who bypasses the famous sights in favor of back alleys and side streets.

I was happy to find KCRW’s Bookworm with Geoff Dyer. This was rather pleasant to listen to after reading the book. As KCRW points out, “There are no chapters. Instead, one brief section leads to another, making it almost impossible to put the book down.” And, they are very right.

I’ll end with this: an Eggleston image (as Dyer might describe as being “taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis”).

© William Eggleston

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