Love You Long Time.
Collier Schorr
Quickly.
That’s what she told me.
Deadline?
No she said...no deadline.
Blog
Many of the pictures in this volume are already in the children’s family albums. To the children and their families over the years they will summon up associations, details and stories—a continuously self-revising stream of captions. We can only read the laconic literal titles here—“My daddy feeding the cows,” “My foster family on Turkey Creek,” “My mother feeding the cat,” “My sister’s baby’s funeral,” “Mamaw and the baby”—repeat the words, and point to the beauties of the photographs. But in many cases, if we take the captions away we are speechless, as if in the presence of a mystery.
For citizens of the United States, Canada is typically neither here nor there. “Canada” occupies a zone of conceptual indifference: unthought, insignificant, simultaneously the same and different, but in ways that do not seem to matter much in an “American” scheme of things.
For Canadians, the United States is both here and there: insistent, present, pressing and beckoning from below. As the novelist Margaret Atwood put it recently, playing on a reassuring geopolitical cliché, Canadians peer through “the longest undefended one‐way mirror in the world.”
In 1960s Italy, as in so many other countries that were recovering from the ravages of World War II, the unrelenting urban sprawl led to a phenomenon that was new to some degree but also logical and inevitable, and that subverted the accepted criteria of what had been considered ‘photographable’.
But if I keep the details of this house
to myself, leave it as a bare
sketch of a house, perhaps even make it an impossible house
to myself, leave it as a bare
sketch of a house, perhaps even make it an impossible house
What should be of fundamental interest to us, therefore, in regard to representations of people, is the way these representations help to determine subjectivity itself. Representation is a fact of daily experience which concerns us all intimately. We may tend to think that we were each born into the world as a little ‘self’, as well-formed psychologically as physiologically. Psychoanalysis, however, has built up a different picture: we become what we are through our encounter, while growing up, with the myriad representations of what we may become — the various positions that society allocates to us. There is no essential self which precedes the social construction of the self through the agency of representation.
On the surface streets, the monotony of the highway has no home. I walked from predominantly white to African American to Hispanic neighborhoods where the Spanish language was the local currency. West of the Los Angeles River, these tightly packed neighborhoods were a mix of urban and suburban. I passed just north of the intersection at Normandie and Florence, the site of riots in 1992; two decades later, the external wounds were invisible in the neighborhood.
I think that’s partly why architecture is becoming interesting. Because it seems to be a field where form is being taken seriously. It might also be a little bit of an escape route, I admit. It’s more that architecture provides a form of making a show than it does a form for making an artwork.