postpanglossian's photostream  

OK, so, obviously, I'm still figuring this thing out, and I apologize for not having much of an idea how the hell I'm going to approach the potential of it, but I really appreciate the great stuff I've been looking at, and I can certainly promise my best effort toward doing *something* worthwhile.

(So far) you'll see some travel shots, a little of my work as an architect, some vintage stuff, family stuff, landscapes, hometown architecture, and cheap gimmicks. I used to think that I could call photography one of my hobbies, but after having my eyes opened here, it's become evident to me that even this would be, um, a bit of an overstatement.

One of the interesting challenges I'll face in posting my own work will involve overcoming the inevitably antagonistic relationship between photography and architecture as media. This idea might sound odd at first, because architecture is so often presented through photography. However, the distortion photography forces upon architecture goes beyond just reducing it to two dimensions as is typically assumed. Photography also eliminates the dimension of time and reduces the experience of architecture to a smattering of almost unrelated singular moments from single points of view when in reality architecture is experienced as a spontaneously self-designed flow of moments and relationships -- and the ongoing mental synthesis of that flow. Architecture, experienced as something that we exist within, both spatially and historically, can't be portrayed by a photograph, and can only be loosely suggested through multiple photographs considered simultaneously. (Or maybe, put another way: photography isolates and frames, but architecture stitches experiences together.)




I won't ever take photography for granted. When I was eleven years old, while on a family vacation in Washington, D. C., my family watched helplessly as four U.S. Secret Service agents swooped down upon me and seized the very first roll of I'd ever taken right out of my new birthday camera [a kodak-127 square format, with a built-in flash!]. I still don't know what my crime was, but here is a picture of me as an 11 year old, looking like some sort of terrist thug:


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Apparently there's some confusion about the meaning of my screen name.

The prefix 'post' in 'postpanglossian' is meant to function like an adverb rather than like a noun, meaning something closer to "sadder but wiser" or "finished with dogmatism" than to "dispatch of great news!" or "most optimistic of all possible communications!", or "most thoroughly shiny of all uploaded photos!", etc. It's not that I'm such a huge fan of Voltaire, but I do think that Pangloss, as thinly drawn and ridiculous as he's obviously supposed to be, might actually be one of the most terrifyingly true-to-life characters in fiction. I think that in real life he [like his long-lost twin brother Narcissus, I'd say] is a master of disguises in our relentless struggle against our own critical thinking. In other words, it may be our obsession with enhanced self-image which inclines us toward remaining behind rose-tinted glasses.
And, yeah, the use of the prefix "post" IS meant to mock its [lame] overuse in the trivializing labels employed in critical writing.

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...and I don't know what happened to all of that crap that I lovingly listed about favorite movies and books and stuff.
Too bad, it was a nice feature, and somebody could've at least told us they were gonna delete the whole thing.


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