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And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
FROM AMERICAN SUBURBS X
Larry Clark on Cutting through the Bullshit and Hypocrisy of America (2007)
By Raphaël Cuir, originally published in Art Press, August 2007
A year ago, seven short films by Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Gaspar Noé, Richard Prince, Marco Brambilla, Sam Taylor-Wood and Larry Clark were shown at Cannes under the title Destricted. The idea of producers Mel Agace and Neville Wakefield was to deal “explicitly” with sexuality, and so blur the boundaries between art and pornography. The films go on general release in France this spring (April 25) and a DVD is due in October. Here was a perfect reason for making an old dream come true and meeting up with Larry Clark, whose short is definitely the most graphic of the seven.(1)
While the images from Larry Clark’s Tulsa series (1963 – 1971) may have lost some of their subversive edge over the last forty-odd years, they remain as intense as ever. Clark always claims that there is a price, an emotional price to be paid for such violence. In the past, this meant the return of the repressed, the other side of the American dream (some people still haven’t got over it). Today, still, it means opening “the whole of human nature to consciousness of the self” (Bataille).
And, since “we cannot know what the body is capable of” (Spinoza), we must explore, and there are many surprises ahead of us (Nietzsche: “What’s amazing is the body”). Adolescence is a key moment in this exploration; it is when an individual discovers the possibilities offered by physical maturity. The physical omnipotence of teenagers, who balk at nothing but do not always measure the consequences of their acts, is at the heart of Clark’s concerns. How lives change, get trapped, slip away from themselves, how they avoid the worst, how, at each moment, our acts engage our responsibility, condition our lives, and what the world does with us—that is what Clark’s films home in on. Clark himself has looked deep into the abyss, and though he has stepped back from the edge he continues to show us what is there—what regards us there. He has chosen to exhibit the “brutality” of facts (Michel Leiris), but in the intimacy and the density of the moment preserved forever on film. Forty years on, Clark’s first images continue to remind us that the abyss is within us (Victor Hugo). His Kids is already a classic.
An Interview with Larry Clark: “If It’s Part of Life, It’s (Not) Pornography”
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Cover of Tulsa (1963-1971) by Larry Clark
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CARLO MOLLINO: "POLAROIDS 1962-1973">>>
In a career that spanned more than four decades, Carlo Mollino designed buildings, homes, furniture, cars, aircraft. One of the most dashing figures of mid-century Italy, Mollino was famed for his design finesse and his elegant organicism. In 1949 he published an important book on photography: Message from the Darkroom. Sometime around 1960, he began to seek out women—mostly dancers—in his native Turin, inviting them to his villa for late-night modeling sessions. The models would pose against extraordinary backdrops, designed by Mollino, in clothing, wigs and accessories that he had carefully selected. Finally, having printed the Polaroids, Mollino would painstakingly amend them with an extremely fine brush, to at- tain his idealized vision of the female form. The 1200 pictures remained a secret until after his death, in 1973.
Thomas Ruff: The Architect of the Image
Thomas Ruff (born 1958) is a central figure of the Düsseldorf School of Photography. Having studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher, he eventually moved beyond their "straight" documentary style to deconstruct the "grammar of photography"—investigating how images are constructed, distributed, and perceived.
1. Key Conceptual Series
Porträts (1980s–1990s)
Ruff’s most famous body of work features expressionless peers photographed like passport IDs.
Scale: In 1986, he began printing these at a monumental scale (over 2 meters high).
Effect: The massive size forces a confrontation with the physical surface (pores, iris patterns) while maintaining a psychological distance, challenging the idea that a portrait reveals a subject's "soul."
Sterne (1989–1992)
Ruff stopped using a camera for this series, instead acquiring archival negatives from the European Southern Observatory.
nudes (1999–present)
Ruff explored the internet's impact on visual culture by downloading low-resolution pornographic thumbnails.
jpegs (2004–2007)
This series investigates "artifacting" in digital compression.
The Grid: He enlarged images of cataclysms or landscapes until the JPEG compression grid became visible. From a distance, they appear representational; up close, they dissolve into a grid of colored squares.
Photograms (2012–present)
Reimagining the classic darkroom technique virtually, Ruff uses custom-designed software to simulate light on paper. These are "camera-less" images created entirely in a digital environment.
2. Legacy and Impact
Ruff’s contribution lies in his skepticism of photographic authenticity. He famously stated, "Most of the photos we come across today are no longer really authentic." By using everything from police composite machines to NASA satellite data, he proves that a photograph is a highly constructed surface reflecting technological and cultural biases.
Notable Collections
K20, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf
Whitechapel Gallery, London
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Tate Modern, London
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