From: Judy Seigel (jseigel@panix.com)
Date: 05/14/01-10:20:20 PM Z
On Mon, 14 May 2001, Darryl Baird wrote:
> As Minor saw the spiritual aspects in all things, I doubt this
> interpretation would withstand close scrutiny....
I think Darryl makes the point very tactfully. And there's an important
other point -- the quality of a photographer's photographs is entirely
unrelated to the quality of his/her, um, prose.
Minor White was a wonderful photographer, and also editor for some years
of Aperture, in its golden age (or what I think in retrospect is
considered its golden age.... I was somewhere else at the time). However,
if you try to parse his WRITING, mystico spirituoso religico abstrusico,
it comes out like the famous kikki bird, or like peeling an onion, you go
round & round & in the end, simply onion air.
P-F # 5 quoted A. D. Coleman (p. 24) TYPICALLY over the top & HYSTERICALLY
out-of-proportion, but in 1973 so riled up at some major Minor spiritual
effluvia he said White's "Octave of Prayer" was an "insidious insult to
all photographers... proto-totalitarian... self-serving claptrap....
dangerous...auto-deification.. and monumental abuse of power," then closed
with, "the time has come for White to be folded up and neatly and
carefully put away before he gets a chance to hurt himself or anybody
else." (Needless to say, worse than M W at his wiggiest.)
Part I ran in the Village Voice (March 15, '73). The editors declined to
run part 2, which appeared in Camera 35, Nov. '73.)
I go into this, not merely to show what fascinating info you can pick up
in P-F, but because, though Allan's reaction was like star wars over a
hiccup, it rightly suggests that attempts to get useful literal meaning
from Minor aphorisms are fruitless. BUT I SWEAR, I asked the question
because it sounded like (was it Thor?) got it & here was my chance to get
it too.
Whichever, what started out this AM as "let the subject generate its own
photograph. Become a camera." Became "let the subject generate it's own
....", the insidious creeping apostrophe turning "its," which is the
possessive form, into "it's," which is the contraction of "it is."
Either way, it's unclear if the sentence is supposed to be instruction, as
let the subject become a camera, or telling the reader to become a camera,
in the way of the Christopher Isherwood (also gay, can it be mere
coincidence?) play set in 1930s Berlin.
Enough?
Judy
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