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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.
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.
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.
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.
These pictures, and the way he would get excited while sharing them with me, drawing on his incredibly detailed memory, made me fall in love with photography and conditioned my whole working life in this field. Photography was something just for us, something that he and I shared and jealously guarded for the two of us.
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