Richard "Chip" Benson (seen above in an earlier Lee Friedlander photograph) once said something when I was a graduate student in the Photography program at Yale that has stayed with me all these years. Of course Chip said a lot of things during my two years there and in the many years before and after that I'm sure were equally as insightful. There were frequent moments during my grad school years in which he was visibly having a real insight into the pictures under consideration and was trying to figure out how to formulate his response verbally. He did so often and brilliantly. What came out of his looking and thinking were wonderful gems of observation that were rich in insight. I came to look forward to those moments, waiting for a particularly astute and meaningful observation that provided an unanticipated way into more than just what was actually under consideration; the idea usually had broader resonances and implications. On this particular occasion--and I can't recall exactly what or whose photographs he was talking about--he made the observation that, "The things that are in the world are more interesting than almost anything you can make up." I do remember that he was responding to the then increasing propensity for photographers to stage things and events in front of the camera rather than going out into the world, looking for them and then describing them through the camera.

      On the surface his comment seemed to imply that the pictures made by those who favored staging things would never have the same degree of quirky surprise and revelation contained in those pictures made by the subjective but responsive observer. That was one way to take Chip's remark. Truth often is often stranger than fiction after all. But what Benson's comment made me realize anew was that in order to be even more deeply engaging, staged photographs needed to contain some aspect of the real world, some aspect of the unanticipated, what  might have called some real world alliteration if it were to unfold more deeply within the viewer's psyche. Often it is that one little real world visual allusion contained within the photograph that gives it what Roland Barthes referred to as the punctum. So rather than take Chip's comment literally, I took it as a strong suggestion that if one were going to stage the pictures, there still had to be some allowance (intentional or not) for the presence of some aspect of the unmediated world to inhabit the photograph as well. This is what allows the photograph to become not merely visual representation, but hopefully allows it to breathe with the resonance of real experience. Of course there are photographs in which allusion to the "real" world is not at all the intent of the photographer/artist, but because it is difficult to control every single aspect of the picture making process, these things often slip in at any rate.

Some of the most engaging, informed, and expansive art criticism occurring in the daily press happens in the pages of the New York Times. I'm talking specifically about the music criticism written by the trio of Nate Chinen, Jon Pareles, and Ben Ratliff. Day after day and week after week, across a vast range of musical styles and practice, these writers offer up some of the most engaging and knowing writing and criticism I have ever had the pleasure to read. I was reminded of this yet again reading the review of the final reunion concert of Return To Forever (photograph, left) in todays Times. Chinen, Pareles, and Ratliff write with not only a technical knowledge of (seemingly) trained musicians, but also with a deep sense of the cultural history of the music that they write about and a deep passion. In today's article, using the recent reunion and tour of this seminal 70s jazz-fusion band, Ratliff attempts to come to grips with what makes music (and by extension art in general) timeless: "...You know: lots of music can be great, but when it's better than great it's "timeless". "

      He goes on the examine what he wittily refers to as the "Phenomenology and Ethics of Band Reunions," comparing the band's musical present with its musical past, succinctly noting that at the moment of its inception--given the collective histories of bassist Stanley Clarke, keyboardist Chick Corea, guitarist Al DiMeola, and drummer Lenny White--the band then boldy represented and articulated an evolutionary "next step" in the tradition of jazz: "At the time, Return to Forever was a complex organism. It reflected the newest advances in recording and electric instruments; the space-opera fantasies that had spread through jazz and funk, from Sun Ra to Parliament's "Mothership Connection," Mr. Corea's study of the improvised flash in Afro-Cuban music...and the lessons of Miles Davis..." This kind of adventurous and knowing writing in a daily paper has made me anticipate these writers articles in ways that I seldom anticipate the writing about the visual arts in that same publication. These three writers are penning meaningful and expressive cultural histories that should serve as a model for others who would take up the task of writing about the creative and cultural utterances of others. On those occasions when they have penned obituaries, they always manage to provide some insightful  information buried deep in the musician's history that only the true cognoscenti would know. Their writings seem grounded in a knowledge of music's broad history, its practices and theories, its place in the cultural moment, and the quality of its public execution. And they clearly love the well crafted written word.