… there have been many gardeners who write well, or writers who garden well… i am neither but i will do my best to extol the attention paying virtues of gardening, especially when it is gardening for food… that is what i have chosen to make my specialty, since i love to cook… H manages the ornamental gardening with some heavy lifting help from me…

… my food gardening is constrained to herbs, tomatoes, onions, leeks and zucchini this year…

… the spot in our yard with the most sun is paved over with an asphalt drive so i have worked out a raised bed system using livestock watering troughs fitte with 4” perforated drain pipe to provide a water reservoir… i can go days without watering even in height of summer…

… there are four of them at present…

… thyme, sage and oregano planted last year and returning, tomatoes and zucchini added this year…

… dill, tarragon, tomatoes and zucchini…

… onions, leeks and tomatoes…

… rosemary, parsley, basil and tomatoes…

…it’s all experimental for me, i am in the learning phase…

… although there is lots of noise on the bridge, the views are stunning…

… and it’s a good walk, nearly 15k steps from my front door to the other side and back…

… it’s good thinking time… i have begun to crystallize plans for reconfiguring my web presence, stay tuned…

… today i experimented with publishing as i go to micro.blog and i am excited… the rules of the game, publish as you go, don’t worry if you don’t go, write in short bursts, post… simple…

… this post intrigues me immediately and locks me in with this image:

Susanne Bartsch and a friend © Rafael Fuchs

Photographer Rafael Fuchs reflects on his early work shooting fashion for the cult nightlife zine that captured the magic and madness of the club scene.¹

… fascinating article, the body of work by its very nature conceptual… it covers a period of time that i lived in NYC and was only vaguely aware of this scene as i am not the party animal in this sense though it is the kind of scene i would have liked to experience at least a small amount of…

… i looked at a number of photo projects this morning before landing on this one… i prefer conceptual projects which this one very much is… here is an intriguing pairing from the book:

Spread from the book “How to Look Natural In Photos” © Beata Bartecka and Łukasz Rusznica

All of the photographs in the book are assembled from the Institute of National Remembrance: Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (IPN), which examines Polish history between the early 20th century and the fall of the totalitarian system.¹

… buy it here…

… which turns out to be…

embrace the change, think carefully about your world, and what you want it to be.

And when you hit a roadblock, go around it, or move it out of the way, gracefully and efficiently.

If you need the clippers, instead of the axe, no worries.

Just grab the tool that’s right for the job.¹

… as i ponder this, i think i have lined up the best tools, but maybe not?… between #Ulysses, Wordpress, Micro.blog… the micro.blog site needs to become my NOAP outlet, which then needs to be closed down on my Wordpress photography page?…

… Fiona restless last night, up and pacing on the bedroom floor, i exposed my feet and she gave me a thorough foot cleaning, it kept her busy… didn’t sleep as well as i would have liked to… i believe she is going into heat…

… coffee made, animals attended to, my first half hour spent researching and purchasing an ergonomic mouse, i found a very popular one with high ratings on Amazon… it is a vertical mouse that holds the hand in a more handshake sort of orientation… hoping it will help with shoulder and neck pain issues that i have begun to think are related to mousing…

… i check to see if my Dark Matter book is getting any closer to delivery… i find out that it has left a postal facility in Connecticut which means it’s on its way to Beacon, or some facility near Beacon and then Beacon… looking forward to seeing it, trying to decide if i will purchase multiple copies or not… i have cash on hand and i am wondering the best use of that cash to further my photography…

… i am getting increasingly behind on posting my NOAP writings… wondering how, where, what to publish, wondering if i can make it more attractive to read, look at, if i can drive more traffic to my website, if i care if there are more eyes on my website… really, do i care?… should i care?… i keep telling myself that i am resisting the market capitalist imperative that one drive as much attention to themselves or their company as possible, that this is what success is built on… but this is egocentric it seems to me, if we are not egocentric, then we don’t succeed in this society… is that healthy?…

02 Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag

… Sontag opens by taking up Virginia Wolf’s contention that War is a man’s game and folly… i certainly used to hold that idea in my head, that if women were in charge there would be much less war, maybe even no war, alas, i think the reason war is Men’s work is that men have been in charge of it for so long… as women increasingly take charge, little is changing…

…the broad case Sontag makes is that pictures of war atrocities seldom tell all the truth and are often put in the service of telling lies, propaganda…

…there are many uses of the innumerable opportunities a modern life supplies for regarding—at a distance, through the medium of photography—other people’s pain. Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.¹

…the inherent problem of documentary photography, how does it stay honest, believable…

…images have the power to make one feel all kinds of things, but people everywhere feel amidst contexts and realities that are different, sometimes vastly different, and so, they come to different conclusions and the image or film has yet to be made that actually prevented the madness of war… what power an image has depends on whose hands it is in and how they are using it to support their thesis… is all imagery propaganda?…

_In contrast to a written account—which, depending on its complexity of thought, reference, and vocabulary, is pitched at a larger or smaller readership—a photograph has only one language and is destined potentially for all.²

…on imagery in the service of commercial enterprise…

The hunt for more dramatic (as they’re often described) images drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the normality of a culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value.³

…and…

in a culture radically revamped by the ascendancy of mercantile values, to ask that images be jarring, clamorous, eye-opening seems like elementary realism as well as good business sense. How else to get attention for one’s product or one’s art?⁴

…one of my principle complaints of the coverage of war by TV media is that it is presented much like a sporting event, with all the hype and the bevy of commentators to analyze every side of the matchup and convince the public to stay tuned because it is not possible to know for sure what will happen, and in staying tuned, we can sell you our products… the whole game in a society centered on the market is to direct as many eyeballs and ears to one place as possible and then sell whatever needs selling… presidential debates are also presented as sports spectacle to make them more appealing, but this undermines the seriousness of what is at stake and encourages the body politic to take sides…

… Sontag tells us that every photograph has a point of view, that of the individual making the photograph, and as such, it is not the recording of “unvarnished” reality, ever… the making and seeing of photographs is connected to a nervous system… even today, when picture taking can be automated, the setting up of the automation is connected to nervous systems, to a point of view, albeit that of the state or corporation surveilling…

Heather Cox Richardson on the voting rights struggle playing out in Georgia and across the country… https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-1-2021?r=3lmw0&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=copy

… last article to review today, a pretty rich morning… appealing to my interest in the state of womanhood, this documentary on Nichibo Kaizuka, a women’s volleyball team which rose to fame and cultural icon status because of their winning ways… they were dubbed the “Oriental Witches”… there is so much to unpack in that moniker alone… titled The Witches of the Orient, it is on view at Doc Fortnight, which requires an expensive MoMA membership to view, but if you are already a member, or maybe you should become a member, most of the fee is tax deductible…

… Brain Pickings brings me the beautiful poem Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye, i quote the last two stanzas:

_Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, _You must wake up with sorrow. _You must speak to it till your voice _catches the thread of all sorrows _and you see the size of the cloth.

_Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, _only kindness that ties your shoes _and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, _only kindness that raises its head _from the crowd of the world to say _It is I you have been looking for, _and then goes with you everywhere _like a shadow or a friend.¹

… an article on David Hockney, as i look through images of his paintings, it occurs to me that his paintings and the work of photographers who stage their photography, Gregory Crewdson comes to mind here, have much in common… in fact, Hockney’s style strikes me as very much zoom driven photographic… here is a Crewdson image from Beneath the Roses:

… what do you think?

… very low tide, i take the opportunity to explore shoreline not always available… it is cold, a little breezy, dusting of snow here and there… the birds call to one another, looking for mates?… Nancy stops to say hello, tell me she came to my zoom talk last month, that she liked it, wishes she could see the prints, i tell her i am hoping to bring the show to Beacon…

… so, AnOther magazine has been particularly interesting this morning… this interview with trans woman Shon Faye caught my attention… i am interested in the feminine, femininity, and gender fluidity and have been doing a lot of reading about it… the podcast, Call Me Mother sounds interesting… she is interviewed by James Greig… in discussing the modern trend of bringing all the various gender alternative ways of being under the common banner of “LGBTQ+” she has this to say:

_ I think the value of it is more as a political coalition than a ‘community’. Even among my own group, white trans women, I still probably have more in common with other trans women who grew up in gay male scenes, than I do with the kind of trans woman who works in tech and identifies as a lesbian. It’s more than just our identity: it’s about our life experiences, who our friends are and where we go out._

We ourselves might really care about these differences, and I think the internet and social media really encourages the idea of atomising your identity. And yes, that’s fine. But often the people who are discriminating against us or oppressing us don’t actually give a fuck about the differences between us, and that’s a key thing to keep in mind. But that said, I wanted a spectrum of identities on the podcast because I realised that these histories really are unique.¹

… i read about Pixy Liao’s staged photographic work calling into question the patriarchy and its notion of the place of women… it has been getting a lot of attention… there is currently an exhibit at Fotografiska in New York City… one of her images:

After Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, Experimental Relationship series, 2019, © Pixy Liao¹

… the incorporation of this work into the gallery and museum art system is the beginning of its absorption into the patriarchy and neutralization of its message as noted by Abigail Solomon Godeau in quoting Walter Benjamin in Photography at the Dock:

We are faced with the fact… that the bourgeois apparatus of production and publication can assimilate astonishing quantities of revolutionary themes, indeed, can propagate them without calling its own existence, and the existence of the class that owns it, seriously into question²

… this has a tendency to neuter the message… it is interesting as Asian art too, given the Atlanta shootings, it clearly is in opposition to the myth that woman, particularly Asian woman, is/should be passive/submissive…

… Godeau, in discussing the work of Connie Hatch, notes that her work is not easily commodified, existing primarily as performative slide shows, which makes the neutering of its message difficult… Godeau notes:

To refuse to supply the apparatus, as Benjamin and Brecht enjoined, may in fact be possible only by affirming one’s place in the peripheral spaces outside the emporium of high culture.³

Two new arrivals in my photography library. I have developed a keen interest in photography and women. Women in front of the camera. Women behind the camera. Women critiquing photography. As I have said, it’s an odd rabbit hole for an older white American male to go down, but we don’t choose our rabbit holes, they choose us.

Last weekend to see my Dark Matter show at WAAM (Woodstock Artist Association Museum, Woodstock NY) tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday, noon to 3PM. Don’t miss this well received show!

Some photos from this morning…

… another book for my library on the subject of being woman, Girlhood by Melissa Febos…

… from a recent Guernica Magazine interview…

The abuse and subjugation of women’s bodies has been considered the right of men for much longer than it hasn’t. I mean, think of the resistance to affirmative consent legislation—people get really bent out of shape at the idea of men even being expected to ask before they touch you. They would rather women have sex they don’t want than have men suffer the supposed awkwardness of asking for verbal consent.¹

… and…

I used to sit in school looking at the people around me, and marvel at how perverse it was that we all walked around in makeup and plucked out our body hair and talked about bullshit all day. I was acutely aware of the fact that human society as I knew it—capitalism, patriarchy, manners—were all just one way things could have gone, a set of narratives that we collectively decided to collude in every minute of every day. I guess I wanted out.²

… pre-ordered, probably good i don’t have it right away, still trying to finish de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex… it’s an odd subject for an American white male in his 60’s to be interested in, i know… my interest in fine art photography brought me to it… as i reviewed images of women in my photography feeds, I began to wonder about the many ways women are photographed, how they make photographs, how they critique photography… i don’t know what i will do with what i learn, for now, i am just learning…

They specifically like Law and Order to be embodied in a chief. In all Olympus, there is one sovereign god; the prestigious virile essence must be gathered in one archetype of which father, husband, and lovers are merely vague reflections. It is somewhat humorous to say that their worship of this great totem is sexual; what is true is that women fully realize their infantile dream of abdication and prostration. In France, the generals Boulanger, Pétain, and de Gaulle have always had the support of women; one remembers the purple prose of L’Humanité’s women journalists when writing about Tito and his beautiful uniform. The general or the dictator—eagle eye, prominent chin—is the celestial father the serious universe demands, the absolute guarantor of all values.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex (p. 641). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.