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.

Monday, May 29, 2023

Photography and Transience

Photo by Thomas Wågström, from his Case Closed (2022)









Karl Ove Knausgaard, in his absorbing “Thomas Wågström’s Pictures of the Living and the Lifeless” (newyorker.com, April 26, 2023), says, 

All photographs are about transience. This lies in the very nature of photography, since everything in the world is continually changing, and what a photo depicts vanishes the next instant, or becomes something else. One could say that all photography is about loss. But one could also say the opposite: photographs salvage something from time, as from a burning house.

This, to me, is just about the most perfect definition of photography I’ve ever read. The key is transience. Time pours, an unstanchable flow. What photography captures is the brief being of what never again will be. Photos are transiencies – instants of flux forever held.  

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