Comments on: There Are More Things on Heaven and Earth Than Dreamt of in Your Critique

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 20 Jul 2013 13:26:58 +0000

Hmm, still the hate on empiricism… Putting it simply, if you think that there is no difference between an image that purports to be a representation of objects that actually exist in the world, and one that purports to be the product of pure imagination [which is what you do when you casually sideline the ’empiricism’ issue], then you’re the one with the problem.

By: Bill Benzon

Bill Benzon — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 11:21:23 +0000

Thanks, for this, Tim. It’s been most useful in thinking about my own photography.

I have a particular interest in graffiti, which takes me to marginal spaces, because that’s where most graffiti happens. Where those marginal spaces are ruined buildings, well, the graffiti writers are already at work recuperating, reimagining, reinterpreting those spaces, though they may not be thinking of their work in just those terms. But some of them certainly are. Revok (who currently has a show in NYC along with Pose), for example, has decamped for Detroit precisely because it has many abandoned buildings.

What interests me is photographing such spaces as a way of taking ownership of them. A few years ago I took a series of photos of electric green pond scum. It’s caused by algae feeding on phosphate run-off, that is, pollution. But it looks so pretty and bright. And the ducks and turtles in the pond really don’t know that they’re swimming in pollution. They’re swimming in what’s there.

So maybe by photographing these spaces, but explicitly and deliberatley acknowleding that they are, indeed, there, we can own them and thereby begin to take responsibility for the processes that bring them into being (into Being?).

By: Nancy Lebovitz

Nancy Lebovitz — Wed, 17 Jul 2013 02:28:47 +0000

Thanks for writing this– I agree that there’s all too much criticism which adds up to “if you like the wrong thing– practically anything– you’re at risk of showing that you’re a bad person.”

In some parts of science fiction fandom, there’s the idea of “how to love something problematic”, but I’m not convinced it works.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Sat, 13 Jul 2013 21:54:59 +0000

Dave:

Let me put it this way. Do you read a novel or view a painting and say, “What a pity it is not a perfectly accurate, empirically thorough document of social reality?” If so, then I think you have other problems than worrying about tyrannous ideologues.

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 13 Jul 2013 18:41:38 +0000

While your critiques are very much to the point, I wonder what empiricism ever did to you to deserve such treatment. Without empirical evidence, you have nothing but turgid pontificating, airborne castles of ‘pure’ theory, and pinhead-dance-party scholasticism. By all means critique the normative assertions that lay unspoken behind much of what passed for ’empiricism’ 50 or 100 years ago, but do try not to pretend that you can operate critically in the world without actual empiricism. Evidence tested by doubt is all we have against the tyranny of the ideologues.

By: nord

nord — Fri, 12 Jul 2013 12:21:43 +0000

Very interesting. Especially of local Swarthmore interest because Philadelphia’s 40,000 abandoned buildings is only a little behind detroit’s 60,000 …

I love pictures of Hashima Island and don’t think any discussion of lower cost coal exports from Australia and India adds to their haunting images …

By: Paul Mullins

Paul Mullins — Fri, 12 Jul 2013 03:12:01 +0000

I, too, often have the best intentions to respond to blogs and sometimes fail to do so simply because like this entry they are so thorough and challenging I am not sure I can adequately respond in a comment, but I want to make an effort. I think at its heart abandonment art is social and historical critique told in compelling aesthetic terms, and critical voices are not always well-received. I agree that these images are powerful as reimaginings and are not very powerful if they’re reduced to more-or-less “accurate” representations. You’re of course correct that dismissive rejections of abandonment art are shallow evasions of the processes that made these landscapes in the first place, and it is the worst kind of scholarship (online or peer-reviewed) to ignore difficult questions or evade images as rich data and photographers’ consequential fascination with crumbling landscapes. To suggest there is some “beauty” in these landscapes rings true with me: these pictures do tell compelling stories about absences–Eastern State is an enormously fascinating aesthetic space–and at least implicitly question how cities have been laid waste like this in so many places. I suppose I have sympathy for the people who feel that photographers are descending on their city to pick over the carcass of their community, but ignoring difficult heritage by advocating for their “ownership” of the representation of their community is naive at best and self-defeating at worst. Thanks for the rich post, lots more than I can do justice to but a very interesting read of urban abandonment discourses.

By: Ted Underwood

Ted Underwood — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 19:40:17 +0000

Beautifully expressed. Honestly, my main objection to this form of critique is simply that — at this point — it’s crushingly boring. But there are more substantive, rational objections, and you lay them out nicely.