Word: harper
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...attack that the Whitney show, which was organized by the photography historian Jane Livingston, includes hardly any of Avedon's fashion photography. And there is something valuable about looking at Avedon's work apart from what we know about the charmed kid who blew into the offices of Harper's Bazaar in the late 1940s and set the superexotic Dovima against a trio of dancing pachyderms. Nevertheless, Avedon the mordant portraitist cannot be understood without reference to Avedon the fashion photographer. From his work for Harper's and Vogue he learned how much of what goes on in front...
There are 23 minutes remaining before her Today show appearance, and Zlata Filipovic, the 13-year-old chronicler of war-torn Sarajevo, is snacking on cantaloupe, perusing a Harper's Bazaar and affecting an impressive calm. Impressive because she is surrounded by more chain-smoking attendants than even the Texan rock-star aspirant seated across the green room. While there is no faux blond manager in black crochet at the young Bosnian girl's disposal, her entourage is a solicitous group that includes her lawyer father and chemist mother, their Serbo-Croatian translator, a publicist and a representative from Zlata...
...Harper, the way the practice of literary criticism relates to contemporary culture takes on a role parallel to that played by the minority writing he discusses in Framing the Margins. Just as the discovery of fragmentation in an early work such as The Invisible Man for a reassessment of what constitutes "postmodernism" in contemporary fiction, so can all literary texts more generally be used to call our wider cultural assumptions into question...
...dynamic established in this way, between questions of literary style and questions relating to the wider political culture, makes Harper's both a brave and a very relevant work. He himself insists that, far from being a futile exercise, postmodern theory still has useful work to do: "Despite what we can discern in a lot of postmodern theory as the assertion of a lack of grounding... it seems to me that we willy-nilly constitute such authorities and authenticities every day-necessary." But although theory can alert us to "the constituted and contingent nature of those touchstones...it is less...
Professor Harper is currently working on two projects: a book on varieties of social difference within African-American culture and what he terms "a series of investigations into the cultural significance of privacy." If they continue to push at the boundaries of critical practice as does Framing the Margins, then they should be eagerly anticipated...