When I received a copy of Michael Brodie’s new book Failing, I knew it would take me a while to organize my feelings towards it. Some thoughts take time to settle from a place of instinctive fondness and sentimentality, especially when you feel so strongly connected to someone’s previous work. As for many of us, my […]
“Every image poses the question of American identity not just from the standpoint of our present reality, but from the playbook of iconic images – most of them from the twentieth century – that make up the history of American photography.”
“Omaha’s attitudes towards gender are somewhat unreconstructed – when it comes to masculinity, either you’re a man, or you’re not, and it would be easy enough to describe the place with a set of cartoon signifiers: cowboys and cars, guns and tattoos, high-school football and hard men in uniform.”
“From there it is all ticker tape and pumpkin pie. From the position in front of its double, it’s the smell of Baltimore’s burning brownstone wires and antiseptic hand sanitizer ironically left on the church pew”. “That is no longer considered autonomy. That friend is unfettered barbarism”. No stronger words have been […]
“The achievement of Donald Trump, for every ugly thing he musters to his lips, for every repellent speech and every obnoxiously hypocritical move he makes is entirely endemic of the American century and its reflection in decline”.
“The facades of shops, the techno-utopias of the call centers or mobile phone sales point bleed into boarded-up strip mall windows and the implications of a plastic and temporary commercial culture begin to appear”(BF).
“I think I was working in places like those for quite a while before I knew why I was working in them. I don’t have a car or a driver’s license, so I navigated Virginia on my bicycle or on foot the majority of the time.”
“I tell myself that I am a limitless being until I realize my left shoe is untied and I sit on the curb to attend to its misshapen spaghetti-form of inconsequential circumstance. What point these shoes”?
“Until you step into the frame of a divide, whether racial, economic or other, the words, the calculations and the slow pulse of a printer spitting out excel spreadsheets and dissertations for coffee-stained board room meetings to university viva defense chambers simply limit the constituency that they purports to encourage…”
“Haunted by a crisis of faith in its authenticity, the documentary genre is continually trying to re-position itself in relation to today’s excesses of a post-truth ideology and blurred frames of realism.”
“Without naming it, I can tell you Brian motherfucking de Palma has a lot to answer for.”
“I did recognise the irreplaceable object and destroyed it and my embattled state of mind with America continues.”