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art photographer photograph decay destruction building event 21st_century american 9_11 nachtwey war terrorism media history

✖ Via Time: “Shattered” a collection of photographs by photojournalist James Nachtwey

James Nachtwey grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Dartmouth College, where he studied Art History and Political Science (1966-70). Images from the Vietnam War and the American Civil Rights movement had a powerful effect on him and were instrumental in his decision to become a photographer. He has worked aboard ships in the Merchant Marine, and while teaching himself photography, he was an apprentice news film editor and a truck driver.

In 1976 he started work as a newspaper photographer in New Mexico, and in 1980, he moved to New York to begin a career as a freelance magazine photographer. His first foreign assignment was to cover civil strife in Northern Ireland in 1981 during the IRA hunger strike. Since then, Nachtwey has devoted himself to documenting wars, conflicts and critical social issues. He has worked on extensive photographic essays in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, South Africa, Russia, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Romania, Brazil and the United States.

Nachtwey has been a contract photographer with Time Magazine since 1984. He was associated with Black Star from 1980 - 1985 and was a member of Magnum from 1986 until 2001. In 2001, he became one of the founding members of the photo agency, VII. (Bio)

To learn more about James Nachtwey, I strongly recommend watching the documentary War Photographer (Christian Frei, 2001).

• Sep 11, 2010 link notes tagged: art photographer photograph decay destruction building event 21st century American 9/11 Nachtwey war terrorism media history

The things that made him who he was could hardly be identified much less converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veer of his libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his mother’s breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes, this is him, and how a person becomes the reflections he sees in a dusty window when he walks by. He’d come to know himself, untranslatably, through his pain. He felt so tired now. His hard-gotten grip on the world, material things, great things, his memories true and false, the vague malaise of winter twilights, untransferable, the pale nights when his identity flattens for lack of sleep, the small wart he feels on his thigh every time he showers, all him, and how the soap he uses, the smell and feel of the concave bar make him who he is because he names the fragrance, amandine, and the hang of his cock, untransferable, and his strangely achy knee, the click in his knee when he bends it, all him, and so much else that’s not convertible to some high sublime, the technology of mind-without-end.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 207-208

Let’s say for the moment that this quote relate to the general problem of the representation of the self: of the innumerable and diverse experiences I had, in my lifetime, how and under which conditions am I able to elaborate a stable representation of myself. Or, to put it in other words : How did I came up with a sense of my own identity?

Compare it with David Hume’s thoughts on mankind, Derrida’s view on the grammar of dreams (after Freud), who Pablo Neruda think he is (along with an excerpt from Paul Valery’s Mr. Teste), Quadrophenia, and finally the problem of translation from the perspective of media theorist Friedrich A. Kittler.

Previously on Skandalon: Don DeLillo

• Jun 18, 2010 link notes tagged: author book novel art technology communication translation computer machine DeLillo Cosmopolis identity self network event effect reality life subject subjectivity apparatus node

What DeLillo understood, long ago, is the end of the world would be experienced not as the end of the world but rather as a way of thinking and talking about the end of the world. What he understood is that the toxic cloud that has our name on it would be defined by its lack of definition; that we would never have as much information about it as we need to have or that someone else has; that it would turn into a free-floating void, exactly as withholding as it is encompassing; that it would become part of the landscape and that the landscape would become part of it; and that, of course, there would be footage, endlessly recycled but ultimately inconclusive.
No, Don DeLillo has never written about what about BP, Transocean, the MMS, and our thirst for oil have wrought in the Gulf of Mexico. But 25 years ago he imagined the name for a disaster that would come with its own excruciating and tantalizing Zapruder, and that would allow us to talk it — and ourselves — to death:
The underwater toxic event.

✖ Via Esquire: “Black Noise: How to Define a Gulf Disaster Beyond Definition” by Tom Junod, June 1st, 2010

Jacques Derrida developed a similar idea about the 9/11 attacks. See Philosophy in a Time of Terror

Tom Junod is an American journalist. He’s also the author of the excellent piece : “The Falling Man” (which is also the name of a great novel by Don DeLillo)

• Jun 02, 2010 link notes tagged: DeLillo Derrida art author catastrophe communication destruction disaster event language name nature novel reality representation technology BP

When did people find out? The distinction between respondents made above indicates the striking speed with which this news was disseminated-almost 9 in 10 knew of the events within 6o minutes after the first announcement. […] How did people first find out? Respondents were asked how they first found out the President had been shot and/or how they first found out the President was dead. All were informed by the broadcast media or by other persons. For the EK [Early Knowers], exactly 50 per cent were first informed by other persons. Their reaction was to use radio and television as a means of confirming what they had been told and to obtain further information; 84 per cent of the EK reported that they then heard of the death itself through radio or television. Among the LK [Late Knowers], who were slow in finding out about any aspect of the assassination, 68 per cent obtained their first information from another person. Their initial reaction also was to get to a radio or television set as quickly as possible for additional news. For both groups, the broadcast media were serving a supplementary or secondary role in the flow of information at the outset of the day’s events. […] In this instance, the principal first mode of diffusion was person-to-person communication. Relative access to other people and to the mass media makes one or the other more likely as a first source of information. Therefore, it is essential to examine the first source of information in terms of where the respondents were when they first heard.

✖ Via Bradley S. Greenberg, “Diffusion of News of the Kennedy Assassination”, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 28, no 2, pp. 225-232, Summer 1964. Full text available via subscription or proxy.

“almost 9 in 10 knew of the events within 6o minutes after the first [radio] announcement” : the media have changed (from radio to Internet) though it is doubtful that they became more efficient.

• Jun 27, 2009 link notes tagged: communication technology diffusion science event media technology

But setting aside some metaphysicians of this kind, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.

✖ Via A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume, I, 4, iv, §4.

• Mar 09, 2009 link notes [via] tagged: book philosophy writer identity self network event life representation