Photography vs. movies: Misc TRP discussion during break?

[alice wellintown]

from TIME

Art: Mirrors and Windows
Monday, Aug. 07, 1978


"Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960." It is a
sampling of 200 works by 100 American photographers, curated and
introduced by Szarkowski in his usual eloquent, aphoristic and
pugnacious style. It is, inevitably, a grab bag, but one with coherent
strands in it, and likely to hold considerable influence for the
future.

The most striking thing illustrated by the show is how far behind
photography—meaning the photographs Szarkowski designates as
"serious"—has left its old role as witness to public events.




On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 9:59 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  "Play it fuckin' louder!"---Dylan going electric at Newport.
>
> On the loudness of modern fiction BECAUSE OF PHOTOGRAPHY!....sex this guy.
>
> http://www.sltrib.com/arts/ci_14020122
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> --- On Sun, 12/20/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: Photography vs. movies: Misc TRP discussion during break?
>> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>> Date: Sunday, December 20, 2009, 7:14 AM
>> I recommend:
>>
>> Charles Sheeler and Cult of the Machine
>> Karen Lucic
>> At the dawn of the twentieth century Henry Adams proclaimed
>> that the
>> machine was as central to our modem American culture as the
>> Virgin was
>> to medieval culture. We worshiped in our factories as our
>> ancestors
>> worshiped in cathedrals. In this century we also raised up
>> bridges,
>> grain elevators, and skyscrapers, and many were dazzled by
>> these
>> symbols of the Machine Age—from American presidents such
>> as Calvin
>> Coolidge to European artists such as Marcel Duchamp.
>> Charles Sheeler
>> (1886–1965) was one of the most noted American painters
>> and
>> photographers to embrace the iconography of the machine.
>> But was he
>> high priest or heretic in the religion of mass production
>> and
>> technology that dominated his era?
>>
>> http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LUCCHX.html
>>
>> Forced to speculate, I would say that P's texts are as
>> ambivalent as
>> Sheeler's. The obvious difference is that critics misread
>> Sheeler as a
>> machine prophet, though  Lucic and others have
>> recently argued
>> convincingly that he was not, while critics misread P as a
>> Luddite
>> prophet, though his own statements on this (including his
>> essays,  on
>> Orwell, Sloth, Luddism, his development as an author ...),
>> argue, not
>> so convincingly, it would seem, that he is not.
>>
>> More interesting, by far, is how and to what end  P,
>> like hundreds of
>> his predesesors in American art, uses photography and film
>> in his
>> fictions. His tone or his attitude is not so easily
>> discerned and
>> seems a near futile project at this point. But the
>> tradition, from the
>> obvious starting point--Hawthorne's HSG-- through Crane's
>> use of
>> Brady, and so on, is worth considering.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 9:16 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>> > Recently we plisters had a very interesting--to me at
>> least---
>> > discussion about some of the possible attitudes of TRP
>> to
>> > photography and movies in his fiction......
>> >
>> > I held out for a steadfy dissing satire of
>> photography......many others,
>> > such as John C., thought that that did not explain
>> TRP's obvious love of
>> > movie-going, obvious love of many movies visible in
>> the text, etc.
>> >
>> > Which seems as true as rain.
>> >
>> > So, I could not help turning over the works
>> > in my mind---rereading all of them since then [UNFUNNY
>> JOKE]---in what passes for thinking in my life.....
>> >
>> > And this possibility occurred to me. Does TRP make a
>> lifelong distinction between photographing what we take as
>> the world [while reading] his fiction versus all the
>> photgraphs that make up a movie in his fictions? Movies
>> which are entertainment, some are even art, let's say, that
>> is, that he presents filmed artifacts as fictions,
>> metaphysically, while shots of "reality" or life---and
>> 24fps's deathly failure---are part of a vision which
>> steadily disses "capturing" "shooting" life while it should
>> be lived.
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> >
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