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Austin Nelson
The Lives of Alfred Stieglitz
I thought it would be appropriate to begin this series of posts for The Camera Club with a brief piece on Alfred Stieglitz, one of The Camera Club's earliest and most influential members. In studying the fractal history of photography, we frequently encounter myriad claims of invention and hear seemingly endless debates over true versus
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A.E. Benenson
Public Image III, Museums: Please Stop Hitting Yourselves
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="720" caption="Ed Ruscha, The Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, 1968"][/caption] I think that a lot of the misunderstandings about "new media" stem from the misguided assumption that looking at images displayed on a computer is anything like looking at other kinds of images. Obviously, the images you see on your
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A.E. Benenson
Public Image II: Back to the Future
In a museum someone steps between us and a painting to snap a photo. But it's not just that our view is momentarily blocked, our sight-line is constantly interrupted by something or other in crowded galleries. It's only with the sound of the shutter that we feel something more intangible and more disturbing has been
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A.E. Benenson
Public Image
A theory: photography alone has the potential to turn the public art museum into a community space. What I mean is that photography, unlike any other medium featured in the art museum, is a field of action where the artist and the viewer can convene: within the museum, there are photographs that have been taken
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A.E. Benenson
Seeing Nothing
Below are some early notes for an article I intended to write about the atomic explosion at Hiroshima whose radiation burnt a shadow of the city, at the moment of detonation, into various surfaces. Documentary photographs of the city after the explosion show the spectral imprint of a farm's picket fence on the scorched fields,
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Conversations
New New Photography 2.0 with Beau Torres
https://player.vimeo.com/video/133406538?color=ffffff&byline=0&portrait=0 New New Photography 2.0 with Beau Torres from Beau Torres on Vimeo.
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A.E. Benenson
Flatness and The War
[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="776"] the underside of one of John F. Ohmer's large outdoor paintings, click for link[/caption] Ah Jean Dubuffet when you think of him doing his military service in the Eiffel Tower as a meteorologist in 1922 you know how wonderful the 20th Century can be... -- Frank O'Hara, Naptha, 1959 Before Koons
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A.E. Benenson
The Spotter’s Parable
I once read that the famous American photographer Edward Weston was employed by the government as a spotter during World War II. At home atop the Carmel Highlands, where many of his most well known photographs were taken, Weston and his wife sat with binoculars scanning the horizon for Japanese submarines. It's a story I've
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A.E. Benenson
Conspiracy Theories and Experimental Form
"Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it." -D.H Lawrence I've made the argument that aesthetic technologies and techniques are ultimately derived from socio-political behavior and that artists should look to these emergent habits to discover new forms
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A.E. Benenson
What is That Camera Doing There?
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600"] NY Times rendering, 2011, original caption "FUTURE IS HERE Through a 3-D avatar, you could always appear awake."[/caption] Two weeks ago, Kodak, the company that drove film photography for 131-years, filed for chapter 11 in order to restructure as a digital printing specialist. This week the Columbia Journalism school received