“We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless, as well as of the temporal, and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.”

— TS Eliot, writing in his classic essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, [1921].

Photographs by Walker Evans and Richard Rothman respectively.

Pinched from justinjamesreed’s blog, the above photograph is from Lick Creek Line by Ron Jude. An instant favourite recent purchase of 2012, this book has an elusive and elliptical approach to its own narrative, but it rewards patience and patient fascination, and has a rich, complex feel to it that is stregnthened by repeated viewings. It deals respectfully and thoughtfully with violence, isolation, loneliness, a neglected kind of life for the working poor, and the intersection of myth and history in the contemporary American imagination. Nicholas Muellner’s written piece builds upon the overall feel of the book in inventive, intelligent and intriguing ways.

Go see, go buy.

“Like most romantic works of art, The Americans is marked by a lack of comprehensiveness: a continent is spanned, but its life compressed into a single grief. Yet, what is memorable about Frank’s books is not that it is passionate, or its form defiant, or its vision harsh — these are attributes of the book, not its structuring force. What shapes The Americans and gives it resonance is the transfiguring power of Frank’s eye. Although his feelings are inextricably wound into his perceptions, and threaten at every point to overwhelm them, Frank’s astonishing ability to draw the emblem from the fact serves him — by limiting him — in the same way that Evans’s rigorous acceptance of the prodigious descriptive energy of photography served the older artist. That Frank refused only to imply what he felt, but, instead, in a long series of exact symbols, precisely traced what he recognized, defines a genius as conscious and extraordinary as that which informs Evans’s American Photographs; that he divined in Evans’s work a vision cognate with his own furious sense of the truth, and — in a process embracing memory, intuition, guile, rapacity of sight, and love — transmuted it into the searing account of this country given by The Americans is, however, a creative miracle.”

— Tod Papageorge, “Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence” in Core Curriculum: Writings on Photography

“Her work in this region is characterised by a near otherworldly grace, and a romantic anachronism. Her photographs are quiet, elegant, apparently simple, filled with a bare minimum of information in order that the properly esoteric marvel of each elliptical instant is given room to breathe, and to draw us into its orbit. The arc of the work she made in Turkey and Georgia over the course of that decade is one in which we can see the increasing influence of a sympathetic curiosity and a measured, generously poetic eye encountering bewilderingly simple beauty, and lending to it an ever increasingly individuated splendour.”

— from “The Listening Eye: the work of Vanessa Winship”, up at the Great Leap gallery site.

“Vermont Avenue & Wishire Boulevard, 1979” by Anthony Hernandez, from the seminal book of photographs Waiting, Sitting, Fishing and Some Automobiles, published by John Gossage’s Loosestrife Editions.

See a slideshow of some of the spreads in the book here.

The tremendously impressive and ambitious Redwood Saw, by Richard Rothman. If you’ve not seen it, there’s also a lengthy essay on the book up here.

“The images in Ron Jude’s landscapes are not metaphors, ironic commentaries or ecological critiques. They are not about “landscape” or painting or suburban sprawl. They are not “about”; they are descriptions that pass directly into ontological sensation. Here is how this game works…

The places in these pictures are transitional, and therefore nameless within the standard vocabularies of landscape: between the parking lot and the woods, the train-tracks and the stream, the highway and the field. They exist only as a result of the exigencies and limits of other things and forces. These places are neither physically nor symbolically functional: not “pure” or “ruined” or even “useful”. They are the kinds of places where dead bodies or other illegal garbage might be left, on the theory that, lacking definition, a place is not a destination, and nobody would look where they cannot name. These places are neither discovered nor made; they are simply there.

I am moved, repeatedly, to the negative mode of classification with these images – what they are not – because that is the taxonomy that they demand. The un-noticed or non-canonical landscape has, of course, a canon in American photography – William Eggleston and Stephen Shore jumping most eagerly to mind. These two artists have, in their own modes, made images that redeem the ordinary through a sensuous exultation of representation. The everyday successfully aspires to worthiness. It becomes Landscape.

Jude’s photographs lead us elsewhere. They are unquestionably aesthetic within a photographic vocabulary – the richness and subtlety of tone and light, the twin seductions of fantastic detail and a baroque complexity of elements. How can we not say that these considerations enact that same transformation from namelessness to valued subject? The answer lies in an insistence on non-transcendent presence. Their being is not transformed but thoroughly enumerated in its parts. Jude’s formal structures persistently frustrate the aesthetic closure that transcendence requires. The moment of perception – the light falling on the backs of leaves, the subtle coloration and complex organization of branches – serves only to describe with greater fullness the moment of presence, seen and articulated, not trans-substantiated. We are brought brilliantly into sympathy with this quality of place, and we feel unredeemed but extant: phenomenologically linked to the terrible reduction of these rigorously existential landscapes.”

— from the excellent essay “The Landscape Game” by Nicholas Muellner, on Ron Jude’s photography in Other Nature 1999 - 2007.

An incredibly forthright and illuminating discussion of how crowd funding has driven the work of Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen, as well as what the results have been.

Well worth the short time it takes to read.