Lay Flat 01: Remain in Light
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
Back in the Spring of 2008, Shane Lavalette contacted me about possibly contributing a short written piece to the inaugural issue of a new magazine he was acting as editor of. I said yes, worked on an essay that I titled Close Readings, sent it to him, and patiently waited. The waiting is almost over as Shane is getting ready to start shipping the first issue!
Below is the beginning of my essay. To continue reading, please be a supporter and purchase a copy!
“This brief meditation is about the pleasures of ‘close readings,’ by which I mean spending a long amount of time with a short piece of text. My intent is to illustrate how this discipline—a personal rigor that can be applied at will—relates intimately to contemporary photographic practice.
“Years ago, before graduate school and when I was living overseas, I discovered a book that has stayed close to my proverbial desk ever since. It is a 1951 first edition of Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms. At first I thought it was just another thesaurus, a worn, hardbound version of the little pulp-fiction-style paperbacks they sell in campus bookstores throughout the country (and which had gotten little use during any part of my formal education). I bought it that day partly for the antiquated feel of the binding and speckled-paint edging of the pages, and also partly because I was living in a foreign country and somehow books in English—any books in English—had taken on more importance.
“Sitting with the book and casually browsing the pages that afternoon, I realized that it was not really a thesaurus nor a dictionary of synonyms, at least not how I understood those words…”
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Words Without Pictures (Aperture, 2010)
Short Track, by Jake Mendel
Bird Watching, by Paula McCartney