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C: the Speed of
Light was conceived as, and
remains, a means of keeping people abreast of my professional activities as a
critic and historian of photography, and as an observer of and commentator on
new digital technologies. However, since its premiere, almost all the
assumptions on which I premised it have
changed.
Long
contemplated as a project, finally planned during the course of my time in
Sweden on a Fulbright in early 1994, C: the Speed of
Light made its first appearance in early 1995, in the form of a printed, two-sided, single-sheet
flyer distributed in person, via fax, and by mail. I modeled it after those
periodic summaries of their activities that various friends and colleagues of
mine send out at year's end -- a bit impersonal, of course, for a private
network, but surely the most efficient way to keep in touch with a far-flung
professional network such as mine, since our paths and projects don't intersect
on a regular basis.
When Peter Guagenti, then my assistant, proposed establishing an online presence for me on the then-emerging World Wide Web a few months later, the text and organizational structure of that initial broadside version of C: the Speed of
Light became, with some modification, the pattern for the web version of C when it made its spring 1995
debut online as a small-scale professional home page. This made me the first
photography critic (and one of the first art critics) to establish a beachhead
on the World Wide Web. However, as I quickly discovered, the Web allowed me a
more expansive set of options -- greater room for content, and access to a much
wider audience.
At the
time of that launch, I had almost no experience with the internet -- not even an
email account of my own -- and certainly no idea where it would lead. Within the
next six months, C became the flagship for what subsequently evolved into The Nearby Café, and started me off as a committed internet publisher.
Over the
years since, I have experimented here with the presentation of various kinds of
content for C: the Speed of Light. For the past several years it's had a webmaster, John Alley, who has helped me refine it in many ways. This latest incarnation profits additionally from a comprehensive, floor-to-ceiling design and navigation-system renovation of The Nearby Café as a whole, provided by the splendid team of Marc and Nacia Miller's Toronto-based web-design firm, Crossbeam.
Some
changes that previous visitors will find in this new version:
- the new texts I'll post
with each new issue will (in most cases) remain here for only a few months
before moving a new, autonomous website, the Photography Criticism
CyberArchive;
- the material from past
issues that I thought some visitors might want to access has gone into archives
here;
- my creative writing and artmaking activities have moved elsewhere at The Nearby Café;
- some components that
didn't remain energized have fallen away;
- and I have added some new features, with more to come.
Streamlined
thus, C: the Speed of
Light enters the 21st
century, just a year or so
behind.
This
newsletter has appeared online continuously since its inception, making C: the Speed of
Light the longest-lived
website for a photography critic and one of the most enduring for any critic.
However, though I imagined it as a form of journaling (we didn't yet have the
term weblog), the process of posting new material on a regular basis proved
daunting -- not for lack of material, but because the work involved took a fair
amount of time in an always-crowded schedule. Hence C,
and indeed The Nearby Café as a whole, often went through static phases
during which little if anything
changed.
We have now developed production methods that facilitate those tasks enormously. I plan, therefore, to post new material here on a steady basis henceforth. I urge you check in every month or so, to see what I've added to the mix.
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