No Caption Needed

There has been an explosion of noteworthy blogs that take a serious look at the textual criticism of photography in popular culture. As a photographer, I think this is a very interesting and valuable contribution to our cultural evolution. Photographs perform across our media landscape in ways that are unexpected and possibly even counter to the intentions of those who make and distribute them.

One blog in particular that I am impressed by is No Caption Needed, run by Robert Hariman from Northwestern University and John Lucaites at Indiana University. I have argued many times in this blog that photographs operate in ways that are independent from their context and subject matter, and it is my goal to keep exploring how this works. Hariman, Lucaites and others who write for No Caption Needed take a similar approach, bringing out the performative aspects of notable contemporary photographs in an imaginative and thought provoking way.

Aric Mayer: The Post-Documentary Landscape

Aric Mayer: The Post-Documentary Landscape
Monday, September 17, in the SoHo Apple Theater at 103 Prince Street, from 6:30 to 7:15

When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, the aftermath was beyond the limits of representation. New Orleans was indescribable: at once dramatic, tragic, ambiguous, eerie, and dislocated. On September 5th, within a week of the storm, I entered the city and began work on a body of photographs about the city that would be shown in a solo exhibition in New Orleans at Gallery Bienvenu to commemorate the first anniversary of the storm.

On Monday, September 17, in the SoHo Apple Theater, I will be discussing the challenges of representing collisions between nature and culture, ruin and beauty, and order and chaos as evident in the American landscape, from the flooded streets of New Orleans to Death Valley, from the swamps of the Atchafalaya Basin to the high-energy urban landscape of Harlem.

September 12, 2001

September 12, 2001, on a sidewalk just a few blocks from the World Trade Center. In the six years since it was taken, this picture has only grown in significance.

September 11, 2001

I have no idea how to properly commemorate the terrorist attacks of 9/11. There are so many conflicting emotions and memories. All I have to offer today is this rather ambiguous image.

In the hours after the towers fell, thousands of pieces of paper fell from the sky. There were pages from manuals, private correspondence, printed emails, corporate policy statements, stock evaluations, manifestos, and all the other imaginable materials from the daily work life in America. This was the first piece of paper to fall in front of our apartment directly downwind in Brooklyn. It appears to be a part of a page from a dictionary.