Posts of Interest
Ran across a couple of good photography-related posts yesterday. The first, on Modern Art Notes, is about aerial photography, specifically as it relates to the "new" Google Maps satellite view (this has been available for several years on other sites.) Tyler reviews a short history of aerial photography. Terry Evans is one of my favorites in this area, and Edward Burtynsky is currently working on aerial photos of highway interchanges.
The other post is on From the Floor. Todd's reviewed the Arbus retrospective at the Met. My family and I visited Howard Greenberg Gallery this weekend which was showing a small selection of Arbus' work. I had a similar reaction to Todd.
Todd,
I saw the show a month or so ago. I agree with your comments, and the other writer as well. When I got to that phase of the show, I simply could not view them; I walked past that room, to the next segment. Not that they were "too loud", but they seemed definitely out of place, in the large context of her work. Maybe it was, for me, that these "mental patients" could not defend themselves, or truly be present with Arbus, but some "red flag" just went up with me, at that part of the show.
Having said that, I was not bothered by the spotlighting of the journals; quite the contrary. More than anything, I was taken aback by the sheer number of people in the show, and how they crowded around the journals, almost MORE than the photographs! People had their faces inches away from the journals, trying to make out the tiny text in them; that, to me, was heartening, and gave a whole other dimension to a traditional photography show. Yes, maybe the light could have been diffused, but the main point was that thousands and thousands of people were viewing great photography, instead of sitting at home watching television.