Winter Reading

I stumbled across a converstaion with Geoff Dyer on KCRW's "Bookworm" while looking for a different conversation with Zadie Smith. What a happy accident it turned out to be. I have added "The Ongoing Moment" to my winter reading list. How could I not? Any book about photography that uses pictures of hats as one of its organizing principle deserves at least a second look, don't you think? But what really got my attention during the conversation was the discussion of rivalry between photographers (Strand v. Weston, and Weston v. Evans). It was in the context of 'tagging' subjects and effectively claiming them as their own. Not an intentional thing so much as a defacto thing. In any case, the sharp end of 'photographic territory' crops up all of the time. How many times in the last year, six months, two weeks, whatever, have you seen someone else working with a similar subject and you muttered a silent little internal "F***"? So, I added "The Ongoing Moment" to my list. The same list that only gets longer, never shorter.

By the way, the conversation with Zadie Smith is KILLER.