Word: thought
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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JUST when historians thought it was safe to contemplate the legacy of Ronald Reagan, he's back--and he's healthier, he's richer, and his wife is still rude...
...group of visitors through an exhibition of pictures by photojournalists, he was asked, "If you were to take all the lucky pictures, the accidents, out of this exhibition, how many pictures would you have left?" Steichen pondered that, and then he said, "Not many, perhaps. But have you ever thought how many great accidents have been made by great photographers...
Balzac had a "vague dread" of being photographed. Like some primitive peoples, he thought the camera steals something of the soul -- that, as he told a friend "every body in its natural state is made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped in infinitesimal films." Each time a photograph was made, he believed, another thin layer of the subject's being would be stripped off to become not life as before but a membrane of memory in a sort of translucent antiworld...
...possible to be entranced by photography and at the same time disquieted by its powerful capacity to bypass thought. Photography, as the critic Susan Sontag has pointed out, is an elegiac, nostalgic phenomenon. No one photographs the future. The instants that the photographer freezes are ever the past, ever receding. They have about them the brilliance or instancy of their moment but also the cello sound of loss that life makes when going irrecoverably away and lodging at last in the dreamworks...
...shocking, subsides at last into the ecology of memory where we also find thousands of other oddments from the time -- John John saluting at the funeral, Jack and Jackie on Cape Cod, who knows? -- bright shards that stimulate old feelings (ghost pangs, ghost tendernesses, wistfulness) but not thought really. The shocks turn into dreams. The memory of such pictures, flipped through like a disordered Rolodex, makes at last a cultural tapestry, an inventory of the kind that brothers and sisters and distant cousins may % rummage through at family reunions, except that the greatest photojournalism has given certain memories the emotional...