new from Cuneiform Press

Charles Olson at Goddard College

Staring at the Sea

Just bought Public Access by David Horvitz. He’s at Printed Matter this Saturday for a signing/launch. Here’s the book description:

Public Access is an art project produced by David Horvitz in late December 2010 and early January 2011. For roughly two weeks, he drove along California’s coast from the Mexican border up through the Oregon border. Along the way, he stopped and took pictures of himself looking out at the beach and other scenic vantage points, his stance recalling the iconic romantic painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich from 1818 and Bas Jan Ader’s 1971 Farewell to Faraway Friends. He then uploaded these photographs to the Wikipedia entries for these locations, adding new images or replacing existent images. This action produced a flurry of discussion amongst the Wikipedia community, as its members tried to figure out his identity and the purpose of the photos. Many of the original photos were cropped or deleted entirely.  Graphic designer Eric Nylund designed the publication, which includes a text written by Ed Steck. This was made for the exhibition “As Yet Untitled: Artists and Writers in Collaboration” at SF Camerawork in San Francisco.

Nicholas Muellner in Afterimage

A favorite book of recent years is Nicholas Muellner’s The Photograph Commands Indifference published by A-Jump Books. A master of metaphor, Nicholas writes beautifully on complicated subjects. I was excited to see his new essay in Afterimage this month, excerpted below.

THE NEW INTERVAL

by Nicholas Muellner

Invented and used by earthlings, the photograph is the stuff of
extraterrestrials.
—Henri Van Lier, Philosophy of Photography (1983)

At first it was simply a fascination with the pose: the awkward gesture of holding a camera up to the space in front of one’s face. These six to ten inches, between the photographer’s nose and the screen of a digital camera, constitute a new interval in the world—a space that demands further investigation.

I do not subscribe to apocalyptic or utopian readings of the paradigm shifts enacted by the digitization of photography. After all, pictures are still pictures—flat and mute—and we still use cameras to take them. But the vernacular experience of photographing feels different, and that is because a new gap—between eyes and screens—has opened up, while another, quite different, gap has closed. The old experience was charged with the occult darkness of the film chamber; the new one is flooded with the brightness of the open field. These two encounters produce very different relationships to the creation of the image. In the new space of photography, a picture impresses itself upon us before we make it; in the old order, we impressed the image upon ourselves before we knew it…

subscribe to Afterimage for the full text of this essay

Omer Fast

Just ordered In Memory by Omer Fast published by The Green Box. They make beautiful books and Fast’s work is really interesting so I’m excited for this one. My first look at Fast’s work was CNN Concatenated.