Posts Tagged ‘Walter Benjamin’
packing my library
For the last few days, I’ve been packing my library, removing the books from whatever “mild boredom of order” the shelves may have imposed on them and hiding them away instead in brown cardboard boxes that will soon be packed into a larger brown wooden box and put on a boat that will spend several […]
Filed under: books, Japan, Kansai, literature, Osaka, personal, philosophy, sweet story of Trout Monroe | Leave a Comment
Tags: "Unpacking My Library", books, collecting, collections, library, moving, packing, Walter Benjamin
visual spectrum: Robot 3
The Robot 3 has got to be one of the cutest toy cameras ever invented. On the front of the camera is a smiling robot face with tiny plastic lenses for the mouth and eyes. These lenses are tripped by the shutter button and fire in a counterclockwise sequence starting with the mouth. All three […]
Filed under: art, culture, design, film, photography | Leave a Comment
Tags: film camera, lose the illusion, Robot 3, sequential images, temporality, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, toy camera, Walter Benjamin
Valéry, who had a fine eye for the cluster of symptoms called “civilization,” has characterized one of the pertinent facts. “The inhabitant of the great urban centers,” he writes, “reverts to a state of savagery — that is, of isolation. The feeling of being dependent on others, which used to be kept alive by need, […]
Filed under: daily life, Japan, philosophy, photography, society | Leave a Comment
Tags: 15mm Heliar, 35mm Ultron, alienation, analog, analogue, civilization, film, Japanese trains, LOMO LC-A+, lonely, modernity, passengers, photography, public transit, rangefinder, trains, transit, transportation, Voigtlander Bessa R2A, Voigtlander Bessa-L, Walter Benjamin
There is something distasteful about the very bustle of the streets, something that is abhorrent to human nature itself. Hundreds of thousands of people of all classes and ranks of society jostle past one another; are they not all human beings with the same characteristics and potentialities, equally interested in the pursuit of happiness? . […]
Filed under: daily life, Japan, philosophy, photography, society | 2 Comments
Tags: 15mm Heliar, 25mm Snapshot-Skopar, 35mm Ultron, anonymous, Bessa R2A, Bessa-L, crowd, Friedrich Engels, in motion, Japan, LOMO LC-A+, lonely, passengers, photography, platform, public transit, train stations, trains, transportation, urban life, Voigtländer, Walter Benjamin
That the eye of the city dweller is overburdened with protective functions is obvious. Georg Simmel refers to some less obvious tasks with which it is charged. “The person who is able to see but unable to hear is much more . . . troubled than the person who is able to hear but unable […]
Filed under: daily life, Japan, personal, philosophy, photography, scraps and bones, society | 6 Comments
Tags: 15mm Heliar, 35mm Ultron, beautiful lonely, emptiness, 電車, 駅, Georg Simmel, Japanese trains, LOMO LC-A+, lonely, photography, quiet, silent, stations, stillness, tracks, train station, train stations, trains, Voigtlander Bessa R2A, Voigtlander Bessa-L, Walter Benjamin
