Joy Williams's "Curran Hatleberg's Florida, Past and Future"

Curran Hatleberg, Untitled (Last Light)

Joy Williams is a sharp photography writer: see her “Curran Hatleberg’s Florida, Past and Future” (newyorker.com, August 5, 2022). I particularly like the point she makes about Hatleberg’s pictures of standing water. She says, 

The standing water in these photographs is its own signifier. The water reflected in Hatleberg’s eye, in the world he is chronicling, is slack, slick with torpor. It lies on the compacted soil of the junk yard and the cement steps of homes. Its oily sheen coats the alleys and the marshes. Only once does it appear fresh, alive, sustaining the figure borne on the river at peace, as if in a dear dream.

I love the rhythm of that passage. And the point about “the standing water in these photographs is its own signifier” strikes me as exactly right. Williams is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers.