philip sherburne

Kano

No, not grime Kano, and not Italo Kano. But Malta Kano, of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I'm re-reading and utterly absorbed in. She wears a red vinyl hat, and when I look at this photo I wonder how on earth I could have missed her presence on New Year's Eve.

Incidentally, you may have noticed that I'm writing less and posting more images, which probably related to the fact that I'm lazy (plus busy). But I'm also having a hoot and a half finally having a home for these pictures. One of these days I'll get around to making up smart-sounding things with words, but for the moment I'm quite content to keep on with this ongoing document of the world that stumbles in front of my lens from time to time. Incidentally, I realize these images tend to be enormously heavy, but I live on DSL where such things don't bother me much. But if you're annoyed by the slow loading time, let me know, and if I get enough complaints I may move to using smaller versions. Maybe.

While we're on the topic of photos, I have to big up my friend Sasha Frere-Jones for his own growing archive of images. They're some of the most arresting things I've seen this year -- not hard-as-nails cop with a truncheon arresting, but pink fuzzy handcuffs arresting, in that it takes you a while to discover how totally captivated you are by his insidious patterns and echoes. All these incidentals come together -- signage, graffiti, abandoned objects, street debris, strained motion, the minutiae (and maxutiae) of everyday life -- into a quietly totalizing series that breaks the world down into shapes and categories and recurring motifs. But he's a uniter, not a divider, Mr. Frere-Jones, and so his photos bring everything together onto a level playing field for the best goddamn Saturday sandbox session in the world: rocks and neon and the ghost of paella in a game of rock/paper/scissors where everyone wins (how very Montessori). These photos are like Bernd and Hilla Bechers' series of blast head furnaces and water towers, except that they attempt to unpack the typologies at the heart of everything; specificity dissolves at the very moment it triumphs.

Winogrand was right: you can photograph everything now. And so is Wolfgang Tillmans: if one thing matters, everything matters. Which ultimately, I think, is the essential impulse behind the photography that moves me, going back to Stieglitz's Equivalences and Siskind's pictographic approach to abstract wall markings, rock formations, and even tumbling divers (as visible in the sublime The Pleasures and Terrors of Domestic Comfort, which some intrepid future anthropologist will someday uncode as the alphabet it clearly is). All the drama you need is right there in the details.