Not yet the Painted Hills

I spent the morning walking in POURING rain, hungry for fresh air, for clarity of mind, for a little exercise, and for a new Blip. I found this mess of botched paint on a picket fence and it seems three-dimensional, like a waterfall painted by Jackson Pollock.

I've been reading Susie Linfield's very disturbing book, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence (U of Chicago Press, 2010). In it she explores the ethics of war photography and photojournalism, the need for "truth," and questions about what that is: from the Holocaust to Darfur. What do we need to know? Who has the power and the camera? Who owns the images, who looks, and who is looked at? Power and privilege, politics and art, the image, the looker and the looked-at. Very important questions. Not many answers.

Linfield devotes a whole chapter to James Nachtwey. She says he "is the despised messenger knocking on a slammed door" who "presents us with a family of man that we are desperate to disown" (227). That is, he presents us with our own capacity for inhumanity, cruelty, gore, and viciousness. Not exactly reading material for a day at the beach.

On Sunday, when I have my little mini-vacation to the Painted Hills, , I think I'll leave Linfield at home, but I am grateful to her for troubling my mind.