Nearby Café Home > Art & Photography > Photocritic International

Get new posts by email:
Follow me on Mastodon: @adcoleman@hcommons.social     Mastodon logo

Misha Gordin: Reflex of Freedom (2007)

Gordin refers to his approach as “conceptual photography,” though by this he obviously means something much different from the haphazardly made, often amateurish or deliberately casual imagery generated as documentation of performances by conceptual artists since the 1970s. Carefully planned and meticulously crafted, Gordin’s images are previsualized as sketches on paper, which he then stages for the production of the negatives necessary to actualize the imagined image. […]

Cabin Fever: Bits & Pieces 2022 (1)

Prediction for 2022: The inherently poisonous effect of social media will become ever more obvious. The fact that Mark Zuckerberg has any degree of influence over the survival of democracy will finally become understood as terrifying. […]

Spring Fever/Cabin Fever: Bits & Pieces (2020)

Among my mottoes I include “Nihilism: There’s no future in it.” I find I can only mope and grump for so long before it gets boring. So I’ve laid in a supply of unpopped kernels for my hot-air popcorn machine. Let’s watch the show. […]

Allan Douglass Coleman: A Self-Interview (5)

I remain not optimistic but hopeful, in the sense of the word as defined by Vaclav Havel: convinced that it is important to perform certain actions regardless of unfavorable conditions and even in the face of evidence that they may prove ultimately unsuccessful. For me, that’s the motive for continuing to bear public witness, via the written and spoken word, to the experience of life in my time as I’ve lived it. […]

On the Spiritual in Teaching, 1997 (c)

I may have done my students at New York University a disservice in my final years there, coming to see them as pampered rich kids (which they were, with few exceptions) without also recognizing that even wealth and privilege did not protect them any longer from the stupefying tendencies of the system, which now runs so amok that it appears hellbent on dumbing down everything and everyone, even the offspring of the ruling class presumably groomed to inherit power. […]