Whose Horn is that You're Tooting?

This post falls solidly into the self-promotion category. Last fall I wrote a review of recent books by critic Rebecca Solnit and photographer Richard Misrach for an online journal called Invisible Culture which is published by the smart, talented graduate students in the Rochester program in Visual and Cultural Studies. Well, the piece - initially entitled "Disasters, Political not Natural" - has just appeared; you can find it here.

And, for the nerdier among you, my paper "The Arithmetic of Compassion ~ Rethinking the Politics of Photography" is due out in the British Journal of Political Science in late spring/early summer. You can find the abstract here and, if you have access to CUP journals, can get the pre-publication version on line. The paper has been making the rounds of journal editorial processes for a number of years and finally has found a good home.

Pictures of Words ~ Richard Misrach, After Katrina

Photograph © Richard Misrach.

This is among the images Richard Misrach made of graffiti in New Orleans in the months following Hurricane Katrina. His pictures of words will be published this fall in Destroy This Memory (Aperture). And many of the pictures are now on exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Misrach donated the images to the Museum as well as to the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery, San Francisco's MoMA, and the New Orleans Museum of Art. Misrach has pledged the royalties from the book to the Make It Right Foundation.

Expansive and Up-Close, Photographic Environmentalism

I recently confessed to being the owner of an Apple laptop. I therefore found this report on the newly established relationship between Apple and photographer Richard Misrach pretty interesting. Apple has made one of Misrach's remarkable images the default wall paper for their new iPad device. You can find the image here. I guess this makes Misrach's work the visual equivalent of Muzak?

More seriously, Misrach is an environmentalist. Rebecca Solnit has typically smart things to say about the politics of his work in her recent Storming the Gates of Paradise where she suggests of his beautifully expansive landscapes that they "challenged us to feel the conflicts of being fully present in a complicated world." I think she is right in that assessment. The irony, I suppose, is to imagine Ed Burtynsky or Chris Jordan making one of their disconcertingly tightly focused close-ups of discarded high-tech devices only this time using defunct iPads.