When my friends Bob and Barry got married, as soon as such a thing became possible, I said, first, “Congratulations,” and then, “Your getting married feels to me like the most normal thing in the world, but I’m still waiting for the Hallmark Corporation to print a greeting card that I can buy in any drugstore in America and send to wish you well.” Seven or eight years later, I should really check to see if my neighborhood drugstore’s greeting ...

K Klingensmith’s post “Pictures of You.,” on medical images of the body, asks the question, “For the person who sees a copy of their X-ray, MRI, or sonogram, how can it seem like their body?” I’m fascinated with this complicated sense of dissonance between the body that we experience and the image that we see — between the body that we experience and the mystery of its inner workings, proceeding without our knowledge or control. What stories ...

When we bought the new place, we tried for a while to get something nearer campus. But what we liked we couldn't afford, and what we could afford close to campus were houses that required lots of work. So we ended up buying a place about seven minutes' drive from school, which is still nothing. The whole feel of the town is much more “American” in all the conventional ways than the places I'd lived over the past six years, and cer...

This photograph – and others like it – accompanied stories of the evacuation of Americans from Lebanon earlier this week. The helmets, especially in close-up, emphasize the smallness of the children. The protective capacity of the helmets is paradoxical. The fact that the children – children, mind you – are wearing military helmets intimates the danger of their situation, requiring protection. At the same time, the photograph relies on the ...

I had all weekend to sit down and write my printculture post, but I did everything but. One of the things I did was watch “William Eggleston in the Real World,” the 2005 documentary by Michael Almereyda about the photographer whose groundbreaking 1976 solo show at MoMA put color photography on the art world map. I'd first learned of Eggleston's work in a photography class I audited several years ago, and was immediately taken by h...

The books have begun arriving. They are of various kinds, but one that has struck me, perhaps because it is so immediately accessible, is the film history book, namely the kind that is full of stills. Not so long ago the film still was a relatively high-tech form of reproduction –the captured trace of what was still a relatively restricted and effectively ephemeral medium. Before the videotape film was just that –big, bulky reels requiring a p...

In the last few months, I’ve been e-mailed copies of pictures of the insides of some of my friends’ bodies, several sonograms and a series of MRIs. Images like these are a special province of photography, bridging as they do the scientific and the personal — portraits, in a way, but odd ones. For the person who sees a copy of their X-ray, MRI, or sonogram, how can it seem like their body?

A month or two ago, during a series of internet searches designed to turn up images for the first day of my course on theories of the photographic, I came across this anonymously taken Polaroid of someone I do not know. It has haunted me ever since. And not just because I paid $3.50 a gallon yesterday to fill up the car.

There have been a couple of interesting stories about photographs from Iraq lately. The most recent is the story about the mislabeled photograph on Howard Kaloogian’s website. Kaloogian is running for the Congressional seat vacated by the corrupt and recently imprisoned Randy “Duke” Cunningham of California. On the candidate’s website an image of a bustling city square from a July 2005 trip to Baghdad served as evidence of Kaloogian’s argum...

A recent wire story reports that in “a bizarre twist” Japan’s “camera phone craze [has spread] to funerals.” Despite a brief indication at the end of the story that such behavior might be a useful memento for the modern age, the story presses the idea that to take a picture at a funeral is disrespectful in the extreme: "'I get the sense that people no longer respect the dead. It's disturbing,' a funeral director told the Mainichi Shimbun ne...

(Apologies in advance: this post is not about the Super Bowl.) If you haven’t seen it before, there’s a web site out there that promises to “scour the Internet for the finest in Cute Imagery™” and collect it all in one place in order to maximize your time spent browsing for the cute: www.cuteoverload.com

In the last week or so both Nikon and Minolta announced that they will discontinue the manufacture of film cameras and focus on their more profitable, more popular digital lines. Minolta also plans to stop making 35mm film. Reading this news in the press the situation for photography seems dire. One writer sees in Minolta’s decision the “demise of traditional film photography gather[ing] pace,” while another accuses Nikon of putting “anothe...

If you read the news of the weird, you probably noticed yesterday’s story “fiery mouse burns down the house.” If not, it goes a little something like this: a man finds a mouse in his house, decides to rid himself of the mouse, happens to have a pile of leaves burning in the yard, throws the mouse into the pile, the blazing rodent returns to the house (“stood below a window” and “took fiery revenge”) and the wooden house burns to the ground.   ...

Flipping through a book last night I came across a picture by Jacques-Henri Lartigue that I love. It is his first picture of his cousin Simone, who he’d go on to photograph for years. She is standing on a beach, grinning. Something is cupped in her hand (a sand crab? a fistful of gravel to hurl at the boy behind the camera?) and she is wearing what is now an utterly ridiculous bonnet (likely, though, the height of upper middle-class kid fas...

Following the flow of news images on-line, I thought I’d begun to notice two related trends in recent months. Of the AP, AFP and Reuters images that appear along with news stories, an increasing number seem to be more clearly editorial than usual and more clearly and more often critical of President Bush. Beginning (in my memory, at least) with the images of a haggard and stunned looking man descending the gang plank to tour a Katrina-damage...

Spike the aloe vera plant At long last, our aloe vera plant—I call it Spike—got replanted into a larger pot. Almost as soon as I’d gotten it into its last pot, it had seemed to outgrow it, and the bottom leaves started drying up and dying. Wounded limb In the course of transplantation, Spike lost a limb. The juice flowed from the broken leaf, making the plant seem that much more wounded. So I saw fit to bandage it up....

Last week, I was in New York for the big MoMA retrospective of American photographer Lee Friedlander, who’s been working steadily for over 50 years, and has produced a phenomenal body of work that even this show of more than 500 photographs can’t adequately represent. He’s my favorite photographer, I think I can say that unequivocally, even though there are many fine and fascinating photographers out there whose images I love...

This story begins with a roll of film (shot but undeveloped) that sat on my dresser for months. After a while, I couldn’t remember where it had come from, what event it had recorded or what images might lie dormant in the canister. Finally, a couple of months ago, I had enough other rolls of film I’d shot over the holidays to justify a trip to the photo shop, so I grabbed the mystery roll off my dresser. When I got the pictures b...