Saturday, April 12, 2025
Friday, April 11, 2025
Thursday, April 10, 2025
Wednesday, April 09, 2025
Unpopular bird …
… From the Desk of Mike Stark: A Bird that Gets Everyone Squawking (Hat tip, Dave Lull)
Tuesday, April 08, 2025
John Berger
I returned recently to the essays of John Berger, and finished a collection edited by Geoff Dyer -- this one called Understanding a Photograph. It's a selection of works, most of them previously published, which provides an orientation to Berger's critical themes: the role of the photographer in contemporary society; how photographs function; and the relationship between between photography and history. Taken together, the essays serve as a reminder of Berger's key insights: his uncanny ability to read photographs as something more than two-dimensional representation. Not all of the pieces here are perfect, and some are perhaps overly political; but the few that strike a chord -- that truly resonate -- get at the decisions a photographer makes when framing an image: when that image, if successful, becomes something more transcendent, more lasting than a static moment in time. This was not my favorite collection of Berger's essays, but having not read his work for several years, I was pleased to be back, and was reminded of his unusual ability to interpret photographic imagery.
"An instant photographed can only acquire meaning in so far as the viewer can read into it a duration extending beyond itself. When we find a photograph meaningful, we are lending it a past and a future."