I skipped the March-May 2009 issue of my long-running web newsletter, C: the Speed of Light, in order to concentrate on turning it into this blog. From now on it will appear as such, under the title Photocritic International. You can access it via the URL photocritic.com, and, as with any blog, you can subscribe to it. I plan to make new postings on a weekly schedule.
As an internet project, C: the Speed of Light — which went online in spring 1995 — preceded by half a year the debut of the larger project that evolved into The Nearby Café. We didn’t have the term then, of course, nor the necessary technology, but I conceived C: the Speed of Light as what we now call a blog: a web journal in which I would post news of my own activities, commentary on various events, writings, images, and other material. C: the Speed of Light became the flagship feature of the Café. Using the subtitle “On the Front Burner,” I posted 39 issues of that journal, all of them now archived here.
During the extreme makeover the Café underwent between 2004 and 2006, Café webmaster John Alley and I experimented with the then-emergent technology for blogging. While blogging seemed a logical next step for this longtime Café feature, we found it so difficult to integrate the available blogware into the Café’s infrastructure that, with much regret, we set that idea aside and stayed with our original format.
Blogware has evolved exponentially since then. (We use the open-source WordPress for this.) John and I have expanded our skill sets. So: Welcome to the blog Photocritic International.
— A. D. Coleman
© Copyright 2009 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. By permission of the author and Image/World Syndication Services, imageworld AT nearbycafe DOT com.
Hi AD
I look forward to the blog postings. DO you have an outline of subjects you’ll be covering or will it be what ever inspires you to type?
Can I link it to my web site?
Thanks for doing this,
marita
You’re welcome to link to this blog from your site, Marita. The URL: photocritic.com.
I do have a rough plan for what I’ll do in this space.
• Exhibition reviews. (Coming shortly: Walead Beshty at the Hirshhorn Museum in DC.)
• Book reviews. (Coming shortly: (Ken Schles, A New History of Photography.)
• Event reports. (Coming shortly: Louisville Visual Arts Festival.)
• Obituaries, reminiscences, polemics and such sparked by current events.
• Periodic posting of “legacy” texts — vintage reviews and other pieces of mine, picked from my archive for their relevance to the present scene.
• And more.
Beyond that, I’m open to suggestions from subscribers. This isn’t a bulletin board for community posting of news and notes, but if you and/or other subscribers want me to host, monitor, and participate in a dialogue on some topic — censorship of photography, the impact of photo festivals on the medium, photo education, whatever — I’m willing to consider those proposals. I’d then post relevant essays I’ve published on that subject, as food for thought and reference points, and supervise the discussion. So feel free to initiate a conversation on any theme that’s urgent to you.
As a protocol, start by emailing me a short sketch of your area of interest: adc [at] photocritic [dot] com. I’ll turn that into the topic of a new post, upload some relevant texts if I have any, and add some of my own current thoughts. That post will then become open for comments from you and other subscribers.