Everlasting Love...

In all my twenty four years, the longest love affair I've had thus far is with...books. While probably not the juicy answer you wanted, it's one-hundred percent true! As much as I love photography, I don't think I'll ever love it as much as reading. Though I've read a few books on my iPad, there is still nothing quite like curling up on the sofa with a glass of red wine and a big fat book and diving right into a story.

So, imagine my delight upon discovering Type bookstore's video "The Joy of Books". Since being published two days ago, this stop motion video has gone viral. Not only is the video beautifully done but you can only imagine how much time and effort went into this project! The characteristic effect of stop motion is created by stringing together individually photographed frames of objects that are moved little by little in each scene. Coupled with the music choice, "The Joy of Books" perfectly captures the wonderment I always feel when browsing the selection at my neighborhood bookstore.

Enjoy!

p.s. - the book title at the end is worth watching for!

p.p.s. - what was the last truly great book you read? I just finished Julian Barnes' Talking It Over and I can't stop thinking about it!

Memento Mori

I just started reading a fascinating book purchased from my beloved Kramer's Bookstore. On Photography is Susan Sontag's perspective of photography's purpose and its effect on society. First published in 1973, Sontag's analysis draws on the works of a range of photographers from Stieglitz to Arbus, Warhol to Muybridge. I'd like to share a more thorough write up with I'm done but even the introductory chapter is full of thought-provoking conclusions that I have to share. As one reviewer put it, "Not many photographs are worth a thousand of (Susan Sontag's) words." I'm not sure whether I'm in agreement with all of her words yet, but here are a few that I had to underline regardless:

"In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe"

"...photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power"

"All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt."

"To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a "good" picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing - including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune."

"That most logical of nineteenth-century aesthetes, Mallarme, said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph."

Do you agree with any of Sontag's conclusions? What do you think the purpose of photography is?