Roy DeCarava’s work itself — and what I might call the situation of that work in the field of photography when I came to it in the late 1960s — presented me with some important challenges as a writer about photography, and a chance to define in public some fundamental principles of my own project as a critic and historian. Few people understand what such an opportunity means to a critic, and how rarely it comes along. […]
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I discovered that I’d awakened from my enforced Van Winkle-ish hiatus in a different country, politically speaking. When I took to my bed in December, national health care was a done deal, and Massachusetts was a blue state. Now an undistinguished faux-populist Republican, Scott Brown, represents the Bay State in the Senate, which bodes ill for anything beyond an eviscerated health-care bill dictated by the GOP, Big Pharma, and the insurance cartel. More significantly, when I crawled under the covers both federal and state laws prohibited corporations from making substantial contributions to political candidates, and Tom DeLay faced serious jail time for violating those laws. . . . […] This blog’s subscriber base has grown slowly but steadily since my first post of June 1, 2009. I’m grateful for the willingness of subscribers to stick with me as I develop my own approach to blogging, which falls somewhere between cultural journalism and critical essay-writing, a far cry from casual blogging and tweeting. […] My father, Earl Maxwell Coleman, passed away on October 12, 2009. Earl was known to the photography community as the publisher who founded Da Capo Press, a humanities division of its parent company that began by issuing reprints of some significant photo publications, but soon moved into the production of new works as well. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |
Random Bits #1
The real act of creative genius here resides in Jimmy Fallon’s recognition that somewhere inside “Pants on the Ground,” Larry Platt’s unimaginative, one-dimensional, condemnatory lyric, there lurked the potential of a classic Neil Young lament for one’s own youthful lack of self-awareness: introspective, elegiac, self-mocking. If you hadn’t heard Platt’s version, or learned of the hoopla surrounding it, and this came over the radio without you knowing it was Fallon’s, you’d think it was middle-period Neil Young himself. […]