I start to feel like the last man standing in my section of the field. Many of those who started writing about photography as critics around the time I did or over the next decade have pretty much stopped, some of them quite a while back: Andy Grundberg, Vicki Goldberg, Chuck Hagen, Ben Lifson, Shelley Rice, Max Kozloff, Sally Eauclaire, Tony Bannon, Ingrid Sischy, others. […]
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On November 21 of this year I happened across “November 22, 1963,” a short film by Errol Morris, which features an unlikely interviewee: a Navy Seal turned Kierkegaard scholar turned high-profile private investigator named Josiah “Tink” Thompson. Though I met him only once, almost 46 years ago, I recognized him immediately. […] Our newly renovated neighborhood library, a mashup of late 19th- and early 21st-century architectural styles,offers 40 computer stations and 10 loaner laptops with online access and printing, free wifi, DVDs and CDs. A perfect example of the postmodern library. It even has books. […] My wetware may have undergone some retrogressive modifications, or stabilized itself in what (by current standards of the speed of technological evolution) would be considered low gear. This leaves me less than ideally positioned for life amidst the suddenly emergent “Internet of Things” (IoT), in which I’m apparently considered a “digital immigrant” rather than a “digital native.” […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
JFK, Tink Thompson, and “Six Seconds in Dallas” (2)
What I took away from Thompson’s book “Six Seconds in Dallas” that nourished my budding inclination to start working as a photography critic was this: Close, patient attention to the particulars of lens-derived images would reward the viewer in unpredictable ways. […]