Category: cities
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window shopping #8 (London: tart cards)
I took these photos in London’s West End during 2001-2003. “Tart cards” advertising “all services” were then ubiquitous in the UK capital’s iconic red telephone boxes. Nowadays they seem scarcer. Placing tart cards in phone boxes was made illegal by the passing of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 … By 2002 most convicted carders were receiving…
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unexpected encounters #16: envoi
Il faut confronter des idées vagues avec des images claires. Jean-Luc Godard, in La Chinoise commentary We were staying at the Hyatt Centric hotel in Kota Kinabalu in Sabah, Malaysia, overlooking the South China Sea. The sunsets there are renowned. As I stepped out from our twentieth-story air-conditioned room onto the balcony to capture the scene,…
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unexpected encounters #15: are, bure, boke
By modernity, I mean the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable. Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn…
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unexpected encounters #14: alt.modern
The angel — three years we waited for him, attention riveted, closely scanning the pines the shore the stars. One with the blade of the plough or the ship’s keel we were searching to find once more the first seed so that the age-old drama could begin again. We returned to our homes broken, limbs…
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unexpected encounters #13: sun throat cut
The body will continue to demonstrate mortality as the fate of all humans. It is for this reason that any reference to human animality gravely affects those who dream of its antithesis. They take offence not only at any mention of animality in life, but in science, literature, and the arts as well, as this…
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unexpected encounters #12: road trip journal
The truth is that in this house with its four walls of glass I feel … always on alert. I am always restless. Even in the evening. I feel like a sentinel on guard day and night. I can rarely stretch out and relax … Edith Farnsworth, quoted on panel at Farnsworth House [Sally] Hemings’…
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unexpected encounters #11: in the zone
War is beautiful because it inaugurates the dreamed-of metallization of the human body … War is beautiful because it combines gunfire, barrages, cease-fires, scents, and the fragrance of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architectures, like those of armored tanks, geometric squadrons of aircraft, spirals of smoke from burning villages.…
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unexpected encounters #10: the arrival of modernity
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. Karl Marx, Capital,…
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unexpected encounters #8: phantasmagorias
The world dominated by its phantasmagorias—this, to make use of Baudelaire’s term, is “modernity.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments. No image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds…
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unexpected encounters #7: aesthetics
Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be. André Breton, Nadja Greece’s government has said the country is “turning a page” after Eurozone member states reached an agreement on the final elements of a plan to make its massive debt pile more manageable. The government spokesman, Dimitris Tzanakopoulos, hailed “a historic decision” that meant “the Greek people…
Camera lucida 