Frankenstein vs. the World

“What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once … In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else: the Photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see; it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This” — Roland Barthes

Posted on January 5th, 2010 by admin. Filed under Pictures.

Got this in an e-mail from David Abel yesterday morning as I was packing xmas presents and loose unfinished schoolwork up for a long, snowy drive back to Buffalo:

Was looking at a wild book on my shelf at home last week (9 Further Plastics by Steven LaVoie), and that led me to some online searching. I found myself at David Highsmith’s photostream on Flickr, where he’s posted nearly 600 photographs from readings in the Bay Area over a forty-year period. I looked at photos for hours — probably nearly half of them — seeing friends of mine when they were much younger, seeing photos of strangers and then eventually scans of their memorial programs, etc. A bit maudlin, but irresistible.

Though I don’t have the history with the poets David does, I found the photos similarly mesmerizing. They’re a little stunning. I’ve copied some of my favorites below; hundreds more here.

Tom Mandel, Carla Harryman, Rae Armantrout