“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.

Peter Brown, in an interview with David Pollock for Urbanautica. See also Peter Brown’s excellent essay on Robert Adams, and an engaging conversation he had with Bryan Schutmaat for Ahorn.

“the surprising discovery is that images operate even more powerfully in the oral than the optical channel: that is to say, we do not merely “see” pictures, we “drink” in their images with our eyes (Shakespeare aptly called them “blind mouths”; and pictures in turn have a tendency to swallow us up, or (as the expression goes) “take us in”. But images are also, notoriously, a drink that fails to satisfy our thirst. Their main function is to awaken desire; to create, not gratify thirst; to provoke a sense of lack and craving by giving us the apparent presence of something and taking it away in the same gesture.”   - W.J.T. Mitchell “Drawing Desire” in What Do Pictures Want?.  

Photo: Thrift, Untitled 2006 © Brian Ulrich, Is This Place Great Or What.  

“Most if not all photographers are voyeurs, of course, and often their relentless curiosity is combined with a certain reticence - a mix of shyness, reserve, and maybe a nagging sense of their profession’s intrusiveness. Evans, whatever his personal limitations may have been, had an unimpeachably democratic eye, which blithely ignored hierarchies of class and race in its search for an aristocracy of pure style.”

— Luc Sante, Foreword to Many Are Called.

“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

“Walking Rain” by Peter Brown.

“So much of the weight of consumer apparatus depends, of course, on the production of desire - on the capacity of companies to generate a sense of lack where previously none was felt. Beyond the more self-evident (and very timely) political critique offered by Brian’s pictures, this idea is central too. His photographs never outwardly seek too earnestly the sheen of something beautiful, but achieve it by a seeming accident or spontaneous sincerity that is always everywhere sensitive to the ethics of the image, and the function of desire in our lives.”

— from a lengthy feature on the decade long study of consumerism and its relations to American culture “Copia” by Brian Ulrich, recently released as the monograph Is This Place Great Or What by Aperture.

The Daddy/Dandy. Walker Evans, courtesy of paulalexanderknox.