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Her Mistakes Were Her Successes

Her Mistakes Were Her Successes

Mrs. Cameron has carried the art of photography to a more poetic degree of perfection than any other photographer whose works have come under our notice. No other artist with whom we are acquainted has combined with such absolute mastery over the technic resources of the art so refined a taste and so large an amount of genuine artistic feeling.
Her Mistakes Were Her Successes

Through the eyes of children: Wendy Ewald on teaching photography

Like any artists, they were inspired sometimes more than others. They needed to have their cameras with them always and plenty of film, so that when they wanted to photograph something—a hog killing, a colt being born, a birthday party—they could. Picture taking became simply part of their lives, and especially of their play.
Her Mistakes Were Her Successes

Whistle while you work: George Saunders' 'Exhortation'

If we spend the hour before the shelf cleaning talking down the process of cleaning the shelf, complaining about it, dreading it, investigating the moral niceties of cleaning the shelf, whatever, then what happens is, we make the process of cleaning the shelf more difficult than it really is. 
Her Mistakes Were Her Successes

Ulrich Baer, The Rubble of History (also known as Berlin)

For the past to become history, many of the details that can be known must be subsumed in a larger story, and most of the available information must be turned into knowledge. The resulting larger story or paradigm can account for extraneous, unknown, and invisible aspects of reality precisely by declaring them to be irrelevant to what really happened. The organization of past evidence into history does not mean that everything must be accounted for. Michel Foucault showed that powerful historical accounts are by no means simply tales of control and domina-tion, but that historical accounts can accommodate difference and otherness by inventing new categories, the way a city zones some sites to be off-limits, reserved for refuse or to house mar­ginalized human life which is thus at once excluded and contained. 
Her Mistakes Were Her Successes

Thomas Demand and Ben Lerner's 'Blossom'

Traditionally, you drink plum wine
Deepening the evening, a length of cloud
Then confuse a falling blossom with

A butterfly / In the photograph
Of the tradition, flowers in small corymbs
Papery against electric light

Blossoming en masse, in time lapse
You refer to a place where water flows
Over a vertical drop in culture / Poems

Her Mistakes Were Her Successes

Women Looking at Women: Hannah Starkey and Liz Jobey in conversation

When you work with photography and have women as your subject, you are constantly asking what is the space between a mediated reality and the actual reality. And I think we’re at the point now in the digital revolution where the image is king. The image is the currency we work with—the picture-perfect selfie, the personal profile image, all that. In a way photography seems like 20th century technology but it still shapes us from a very early age. It gives us a subliminal language that we’re very sophisticated in. I think Instagram has really educated us in photography, too.
Her Mistakes Were Her Successes

Zackary Drucker on April Dawn Alison and the transgender experience

In April Dawn Alison’s photography, her solitude manifests an interior space where art and sexuality coincide, where a singular body represents diver­gent selves—creator and object, dominator and subjugated. We witness a self-contained world where a deeply internalized identity is produced and seen, and an ordinary space of domesticity becomes a stage for fantasy and unrestrained possibility.