Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Friday, February 4, 2022

Acts of Attention

Alec Soth, "Tim and Vanessa's, Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania"











Vince Aletti, in his absorbing “Alec Soth’s Obsessive Ode to Image-Making” (newyorker.com, February 1, 2022), quotes Soth on his creative process: “Soth said in the course of a recent walk-through at Sean Kelly, he felt that he could ‘liberate’ himself simply by ‘paying attention to what I see.’ ” I love this comment. “Paying attention to what I see” is, for me, the essence of photography – the essence of art, for that matter. Robert Hass, in his What Light Can Do (2012), writes, 

One of the things I love about the essay as a form – both as a reader and as a writer – is that it is an act of attention. An essay, like a photograph, is an inquiry, a search. It implies attention to and sustained concentration on some subject.

One more corroborative quote – my favourite in all of art writing – Peter Schjeldahl on Vermeer: “Looking and looking, I always feel I have only begun to look” (Let’s See, 2008).

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