I don’t think you can “teach” wild knowledge, any more than you can teach voice and tone; the very notion seems oxymoronic. I don’t think I’ve ever taught anyone to be a critic, or to sound like themselves and no one else. At best, in my own writings and lectures, and teaching, I’ve modeled that, in an eccentric, one-off way. Because, in the last analysis, as the film critic P. Adams Sitney once said, “Criticism isn’t a profession, it’s a disposition of the soul at certain moments.” […]
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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. […] 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. […] 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. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Cabin Fever 2014: Bits & Pieces (1)
For years I’ve told people that those of my cohort don’t have memory problems or “senior moments” ― our models just come with smaller hard drives and less RAM. Seems some new evidence supports that proposition. […]