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About the Flaneur
I walk through my blindness the way I wander down streets in Paris: unfettered and alive, alert to the raw material of the senses. I am a flaneur. Come along with me. Just don’t try to take my arm, unless I ask. What’s a flaneur? Read the first post, Return of the Flaneur to Galerie Vivienne. After that, try Foot Rage and the Blind Flaneur. Then stay tuned.Letting Go of Sight
I’ve canoed on Lake Superior for almost as many years as I’ve been losing eyesight. I return year after year like a migrating loon to learn the other side of a slow, uncertain process that we could call “going blind.” After 35 years with the lake as my teacher, I know what lies on the other side. I call it letting go of sight. Read Big Water. See more about the Great Lakes.Not This Pig
If there is an emerging genetic underclass, I could run for class president or class clown. Read more in Not This Pig (2003).Media in Transition @ MiT
Disabled Americans today have to negotiate for the kinds of accommodations made for FDR, and the caveat “reasonable accommodation” is built into the law. President Franklin Roosevelt did not have to negotiate. He could summon vast resources of the federal government – money as well as brains – to accomplish the work of disability. And it was accomplished with such thoroughness and efficiency that its scale could be called the Accessibility-Industrial Complex had it been directed toward public accommodations and not solely the needs of a single man. Read FDR and the Hidden Work of Disability [MiT8 2013]
Shepard Fairey claimed that his posterization of a copyrighted AP news photo of Barack Obama was a transformative work protected by the fair use doctrine. In other words, it was a shape-shifter. I claim fair use, too, when I reproduce and transform copyrighted works into media formats that are accessible to me as a blind reader. Read Shape-Shifters in the Fair Use Lab [MiT6 2009]
The social engineers who created a system for licensing beggars in New York never imagined that a blind woman had culture or could make culture. She herself may not have imagined it, either. In the moment when Paul Strand photographed her surreptitiously on the street in 1916, he could not have expected that one day blind photographers would reverse the camera’s gaze. Read Curiosity & The Blind Photographer. [MiT5 2007]
Tag Archives: Degas
Attention Economy - November 4, 2023
Edgar Degas. Ballet Rehearsal. Oil on canvas. 1885-1891. Yale University Art Gallery. [Source: NPR]] Degas’ Dancers: Behind The Scenes, At The Barre : NPR 110311 It’s not often that an art show makes visitors stand up straighter. But Degas’s Dancers … Continue reading
100,000 Strolls In The Flaneur’s Gallery
Edgar Degas. Spartan Girls Provoking Boys. c.1860-62. National Gallery, London. Sometime last night this blog logged its 100,000th page view. By Internet standards that is a paltry number, but it pleases me in modest ways. Nothing of my making has … Continue reading
Degas and the Impressionists
Edgar Degas. The Cotton Exchange. 1873 From Jeffrey Meyers’ Impressionist Quartet (p. 168): Though Degas recruited the Impressionist painters, he freely criticized their work. He maintained that Monet created nothing but beautiful decorations, and at an exhibition of brightly colored … Continue reading
Degas: Spartan Girls Provoking Boys
Edgar Degas. Spartan Girls Provoking Boys. c.1860-62. National Gallery, London. I’ve never cared much for the paintings of Edgar Degas. I’ve stood before his canvases at the National Gallery of Art many times over the years, but they failed to … Continue reading