Anahid Nersessian, in NYR, always write astutely on forms.
“I asked him recently if he finds it difficult to teach undergraduates. “Yes,” he said, “because photography doesn’t have to be art.” Unlike easel painting or classical ballet, photography is a fixture of the everyday world.”
[…]
“It is, after all, these same qualities—condensation, obliquity, an emphasis on affect, a posture of confiding—that define the poetry generally called “lyric.” Lyric poetry is what most people think of when they think of poetry, if they think about it at all. It’s poetry that allows the reader into the private consciousness of another person, often the poet herself.”
[…]
““Neither inside nor outside the image,” Chion says, the acousmêtre is neither a detached narrator-spectator of the film’s action nor a mysterious presence hovering in the wings, waiting to be revealed. It is rather “a kind of talking and acting shadow” that seems to be “wandering along the surface” of things, “seeking a place to settle.””
“Although the most powerful art, it sometimes seems to me, is an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself, and for this reason has perhaps been more frequently created by people who feel themselves to be completely alone in this world—and therefore wholly focused on the task at hand—than by those surrounded by “loved ones.” Zadie Smith, Intimations
