Overheard:
"You have to look at your own picture in the mirror"
Time and History
As I was walking down the street one day
A man came up to me and asked me what the time was that was on my watch, yeah And I said
Does anybody really know what time it is
Does anybody really care
If so I can't imagine why
We've all got time enough to cry
Chicago
Taking a break from packing, I was reading a short piece by Latour, On the Difficulty of Being Glocal, this morning [via wood s lot] and was wondering just when it was from. Obviously, it is from ART e FACT volume 1 issue 4. But just when was that published? I had to go back to the home page (several clicks from the original article just to figure out when the thing was first published, let alone written. 2005 is the short answer.
I began to wonder— why is publication date often trivialized on the web as if it just didn't matter when the original material was written/appropriated/published? This seems to be almost a throwback response. Most photography of the 19th century wasn't dated either, because the artifact just wasn't of much importance to history. The internet is certainly not treated as a chronicle, even with the careful demarcation of serial publishing. But I digress.
Glocal is an ugly word. The only pertinent recent usage seems to be from a gallery in Surrey whose blog seems to have died in March. But still, it piqued my interest— as matters of time and space have a tendency to do. The tension between global/local is both a contemporary concern and a historical one. The emergence of documentary photography in the 1930s can be seen as a leveling force against regionalism. I have followed the return to "local" (but not glocal) as a meaningful term, and wondered about those chunks of the melting pot like the American South that are ultimately resistant to being rendered (in all senses of the word). Why is local consciousness in the urban east/west/north good when it is historically seen as the embodiment of evil in the rural south or midwest? Why are these areas infested with "small minded" people, feeding the cliché "think globally act locally."
Reading
Ok, but my photography doesn't always fit into neat, coherent projects, so maybe I need to roll freeform around this world, unfettered, able to photograph whatever and whenever: the sky, my feet, the coffee in my cup, the flowers I just noticed, my friends and lovers, and, because it's all my life, surely it will make sense? Perhaps. Sometimes that works, sometimes it's indulgent, but really it's your choice, because you are also free to not make 'sense'.
AMERICANSUBURB X: THEORY: "Paul Graham - Photography is Easy, Photography is Difficult (2009)"
