绿茶拿铁 Green Tea Latte

Lange's photography reveals a particular sensitivity to the body's gestures and postures. Sally Stein has suggested that the photographer 'viewed the trials of the Great Depression as something registered and grappled with first and foremost in the body'. It is tempting to see this sensitivity to the body as linked to the legacy of her illness--a bout of polio in her childhood had left her with a pronounced limp. In the early 1960s she described the impact of her handicap:' it formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me.' In later life, Lange was debilitated by serious and extended bouts of ulcers and oesophagitis, her illness interrupting and preventing many of her planned projects.

Life (Roy) Stryker, Lange believed that photography was a tool of political action. It could and did effect change. As soon as she had printed the negatives, she went to tell the City Editor of the San Francisco News of the migrants' plight. He notified United Press and on 10 March the News ran a report that the federal government was rushing in 20,000 pounds of food to feed the hungry migrants at the camp. Alongside the headline ran two of Lange's pictures, but not the now famous photograph. 

In her account of picturing the migrant mother, Lange refers to taking five photographs, 'working closer and closer from the same director'. In fact, she took six pictures, submitting five to Stryker and withholding one, probably for aesthetic reasons. James C. Curtis suggests that it was a trial shot, made soon after she got her equipment out of her car, a means of easing her subjects into posing for their portrait session. Considering these images in terms of a series culminating in the well-known portrtait of the migrant mother, one gets the sense both of a careful arrangement of the mother and her children and the progressive editing out of distracting and seemingly irrelevant details. The particularities of context are erased to achieve a more abstract and thereby universal representation of poverty.

The court decision was delivered just now: all three cops were found NOT GUILTY on all charges.

下面的序言补齐了。书的其它文字部分也可以在这里看到：link。

某日天晴日暖，骄阳当头，大下午的俺在办公桌前正在睡梦与清醒中游离。某某同志一通电话将俺惊醒，劈头问道，“他们后来抓人了吗？”

俺惊醒了，“谁？哪儿。。。？”

某某同志，“车祸那儿啊！”

俺快惊吓晕厥过去了，“啊？什、什么车祸？。。。”

某某同志，“我是XX啊！你。。。喔，原来是小X，不是小Y啊！只有一字之差。。。”

俺彻底倒下了。

另外一个同志，在又一个昏昏欲睡的下午，打电话问我需不需不要买可以“化毛”的猫粮，我还以为他要我帮他养猫呢。要是他让我养他的猫两个月，然后收养我的猫，该有多好啊！

感谢这些孜孜不倦的无厘头同志们，让我感到自己还活着。 

Published in Dec 2005

偶然拾起一年半前北影摄影学院院长随手送给我的他们出的一本影集“城市节奏/人的节奏”，记得当时翻了翻没觉得出奇，现在看看竟然看到了多处闪光点，也不知是我的审美提高了还是后退了，当然我向来对城市和人的题材特别敏感是一贯的。该画册作品由中法9名在校（师？）学生创作，其中包括了“鼎鼎大名”的busoni (而且是排在了头阵）。 巴黎第八大学摄影系美学教授Jean-Claude Moineau写的序言，先搬一搬。(翻译：Simon Welsh，王晶，刘芳，唐圆媛，吴沁沁）

。。。节奏不仅拥有组织形成稳定与静止的能力，而且也有形成运动和变迁的权威。它是形成过程中的形态，而非已经完成的形态。但是它确实表现出一种独有的特征，使它更加背逆而非符合一般的变革，因此，很矛盾的是，它虽然受一定的规律引导，但却更多的表现出来杂乱而非有序。所有这些都表明，节奏并不一定要与质疑这一断言不一致，从而才各种媒体的许多艺术实践似乎都着迷与杂乱本身，而不寻求建立任何一种秩序时，通过拒绝所有“形式”的构图，拒绝重点的选取，在“原始的混沌”（或者是古老的“创造性火花”）中寻找秩序和有形。

...Rhythm has the power to organise not only stability and stasis but also movement and flux). Form in the process of forming rather than fully formed and finished form. But it does show a neguentropic character, therefore it is more contrary to than conforming to the general evolution, directed as it is by laws which, in a pardoxical way, tend to dictate disorder rather than order. All this suggests that it would not necessarily be incongruous to question this determination to summon up order and form from "primordial chaos" (or else the old "creative spark") at a time when many artistic practices, in all types of media, seem to be more fascinated by chaos as such, without seeking to impose any sort of order on it, by rejecting all "forms" of composition, a priori or a posteriori.

In November of 2006, Juan Manuel Echavarria visited a cemetery in Puerto Berrio, on the banks of the Magdalena River in Colombia. Within the cemetery, a particularly colorful mausoleum stands apart from the others. The tombs are marked with the letters NN: Ningun Nombre--No Name. Within each tomb lies a corpse or part of a corpse that the people of Puerto Berrio have rescued from the Magdalena River. Most are victims of massacres from the drug war, many mutilated, many simply discarded for convenience, anonymity, to feed the vultures. But here the people save the nameless and decomposing bodies from the waters and bury them in the cemeter. Then they perform a second ritua. A NN can be "escogido"--chosen--by a person who agrees to take care of its tomb, to pray for its soul, in exchange for favors from the dead. The blessed one adopts the NN, decorates the tomb with flowers and often a marble slate saying, "Thank you NN for the favor received." Some caretakers even name their NN, often granting them their own family name, inscribing the given name on the marble.

On one level, the living makes a business-like proposition with the dead: In return for a favor, I will keep up your tomb, decorate it, paint it, bring a glass of water so your soul will not be thirsty, bring you flowers, humanize you by giving you a name. But collectively they are saying, we won't let the violence erase you, we snatch you away from those who have made you disappear, we take care of you, we give you names. Their pact with the dead resists the perpetrators of violence and reconstructs the social fabric. --Juan Manuel Echavarria, 2007

Born in Medellin, Colombia, Echavarria lives and works in New York and Bogota. Death and the River will run at the Josee Bienvenu Gallery through April 5, 2008. (excerpts from gallery press release)

The 2008 Whitney Biennial expanded to the Park Avenue Armory to host multiple installations, performances and events. The Armory is a huge 19th-century clubhouse originally used by the Seventh Regiment as both a military facility and a social gathering place. A designated historic landmark today, the Armory is full of dim hallways, crumbling period rooms, marvelous antique furniture and portraits, and walls mounted with giant animal heads. For artists, it must be exciting and challenging to produce site-specific installations and performances here. And indeed the selected artists presented the viewer with a wide range of ideas and executions. It includes dance parties (Agathe Snow), burlesque performances, a gypsy banquet, a slumber party with cots, blankets, snacks and ambient music (DJ Olive), and a real working bar serving homemade tequila (Edwardo Sarabia).