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Clarence John Laughlin: In Memoriam (2)

I know dozens of photographers over fifty years old who never got their due and are beginning to realize that they may never get it. After three or four or five decades of work, they begin to wonder if, in the current public feasting on photography, there are any scraps for them. […]

World o’ Gizmos 2016

Soon you won’t have to worry about the battery life of your portable devices. You’ll just insert a catheter into your urethra, piss directly into bags around your ankles, and slosh around at home or on the town as your socks convert the ripening pee into electrical charges. I can’t wait, and I’m sure you can’t either. […]

AIPAD 2016

You can view AIPAD as a (mostly) non-verbal version of the book that Benjamin planned to produce, comprised entirely of quotations from other sources. Benjamin structured his “Arcades Project” — first conceived in 1927 and unfinished when he died in 1940 — after the glass-roofed shopping malls of 19th-century Paris, epitomizing that “commodification of things” which he saw as the defining characteristic of modernity. […]

Alternate History: Robert Capa and Magnum (1)

Magnum has straightforwardly become a privately owned capitalist venture, with the photographers as stakeholders. When Patrick Zachmann denounced me in Athens, therefore, he did so to protect his own investment and those of his business partners, as any elementary Marxian analysis would conclude. […]

All Geek to Me

The recent incident in which a disgruntled self-described “stoner high school student” accessed the personal email account of the director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency provides sufficient proof that it takes nothing more than a teenage degree of cleverness and determination to access just about anything put into digital form. Given that fact, you will perhaps appreciate my standard question to the “internet everywhere” advocates I meet during this fall’s round of new-tech expos: Is it hackable? […]