And I ask: How did the beauty of that hair, those eyes, beguile our forebears? How did that mouth kiss, to which desire curls up senseless as smoke without fire? Thus Walter Benjamin breaks into poetry, citing the writing of Stefan George, in the 1931 essay “Little History of Photography”—this essay so strangely titled, sharing [...]
George Baker is a writer, curator, and co-editor of OCTOBER Magazine. He has written or edited books on photographers including Gerard Byrne (2003), James Coleman (2003), and is currently finishing a book stemming from his 2005 essay “Photography’s Expanded Field.” Focused on the work of four women artists—Zoe Leonard, Tacita Dean, Moyra Davey, and Sharon Lockhart—the forthcoming book will be entitled Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography (University of Chicago Press, 2014). He teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).