Re: "Become a camera"

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From: Bob Kiss (bobkiss@caribsurf.com)
Date: 05/15/01-07:53:19 AM Z


DEAR KEITH,
    Bravo and seconded!
                    BOB KISS
----- Original Message -----
From: Keith Gerling <kgerling@ameritech.net>
To: <alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca>
Sent: Tuesday, May 15, 2001 11:16 AM
Subject: RE: "Become a camera"

> I thank you for these comments, for they ideally serve to delineate the
> differences between the (traditional) Eastern and Western approaches to
art
> and life. I've read much of what Minor White had to say, and I agree that
> his true talents lie in photography, not the printed word. But any
student
> of Zen, or for that matter, a student of Eastern philosophy in general
will
> find Minor White's writing to be perfectly understandable. No, it is not
> rooted in Western logic, and thus it stands, for good or bad, out of range
> of our Western analysis. One can not "defend" the Zen approach, at least
> *I* cannot in a short, off-topic e-mail response, but I can certainly say
> that much of what is written in explanation or defense of Zen is not
easily
> "parsed". "The sound of one hand clapping". Parse that.
>
> "Octave of Prayer" changed my life. As an impressionable student, and an
> aspiring painter, I discovered the catalog to this exhibition in 1972 and
> decided at that time to try using a camera for personal expression. While
> my photographic work has departed from this approach, I still often refer
to
> these works for inspiration.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Judy Seigel [mailto:jseigel@panix.com]
> Sent: Monday, May 14, 2001 11:20 PM
> To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
> Subject: Re: "Become a camera"
>
>
>
> 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.)
>
>


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