December 31, 2009 · 7:20 pm

something about being alive

I didn’t expect to blog again this year, but here’s something. I’m often drawn back to this Vivian Maier portrait of a woman in a diner. There is such a human quality in her expression, & something so convincing about the flare & dazzle of the light, so inimitable in the way the coat sleeve falls away from her wrist, that I can’t move on. I yearn to congratulate her–the subject, not the photographer–for having so summed up something about being alive. If I had to choose a “most worthwhile art experience of 2009″, it would be this one. I haven’t read a book in that time, or seen an exhibition or watched a film, which convinced me so instantly & so permanently of its quality.

About these ads

11 Comments

Filed under ghosts

Tagged as

11 Responses to something about being alive

  1. julianr
    January 1, 2010 at 12:45 pm

    Thanks for the link. It’s a great photo. And that’s before you get onto the sub-plot of the things on the table in front of her. They seem to be going about a complex business of their own.

  2. ted tap x
    January 1, 2010 at 3:11 pm

    W. G. Sebald wrote: 

     ’In the obsessive attempt to find reason for the animation of life, a world of images is divided into its anatomical components. this is the operation of speech operating successfully.  
     Thus the sound of speech strives to ‘express’ subjective and objective happening the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ world: but what of this it can contain is not life or the fullness of existence but only a dead abbreviation of it. 
    This really frightens me!
    Where’s the exit?
     

  3. Pingback: Vivian Maier « Almost not there

  4. Martin M
    January 4, 2010 at 9:55 am

    The hand gets echoed in the – is it a glove, or a tissue, on the bag? Then that fall of light between the glasses re-enacts its shape: and you see the handbag and the paper bag are, in turn, a deconstructed echo of the face. Extraordinary.

    Happy new year!

  5. matrixless
    January 4, 2010 at 6:18 pm

    I can’t find anything special in that picture.

    My best art experience 2009 was attending some of the lectures of a girl from Cambridge who had just become a PhD. I don’t want to read books anymore, or look at pictures. Both are types of remembrance, which is pathetic. I asked her out but she was happily involved with someone already.

  6. Lara
    January 5, 2010 at 11:14 am

    “Both are types of remembrance, which is pathetic.”
    Matrixless: that’s a fabulous line for a book that I would like to write (that you might loathe).

  7. fredhale
    January 5, 2010 at 2:39 pm

    Pathetic in the proper sense, perhaps. The pathos of a haunting. All recording technologies are spectral media. It’s a wonderful photo, one of many. Maier’s an astonishing discovery – I’ve never wanted to be an estate agent before…

    Happy new year, everyone.

    x

  8. Dave
    January 5, 2010 at 9:56 pm

    >>Pathetic in the proper sense, perhaps. The pathos of a haunting. All recording technologies are spectral media. It’s a wonderful photo, one of many. Maier’s an astonishing discovery

    Agreed. Good way to put it I think.

  9. matrixless
    January 5, 2010 at 10:21 pm

    Who wouldn’t want to spend his time with real people rather than ghosts? I’ll accept the company of the latter—in my grave (so not in a very long while). Writing is a good way to exorcise ghosts though.

    Lara: thanks for your sweet comment. Feel free to steal the line for your unrealized book. :)

  10. fredhale
    January 5, 2010 at 11:53 pm

    Me. I’m sick of ghosts. Of course, every person is haunted, every soul a site for hauntings, but it can be horrible when someone who’s now elsewhere is present in everything you see and feel.

    But agreed about writing. The important people in my life over the last few years – girls I seem to have gone from sleeping with, to speaking to, to dreaming of, and finally to writing about. And after that, you move on.

  11. fredhale
    January 5, 2010 at 11:54 pm

    Wait, I might have got confused by the ‘wouldn’t’ in your first sentence, matrixless, and got your point quite perfectly arse-backwards.

    Anyway, as you were.
    x