The East River. It is no Arno.

The sunshine in autumn is better than the sunshine in summer. Well perhaps only because this summer has seemed eternal (due in large part to my unemployment I suppose) and a cooler day makes the sun even more valuable. It has been to hot for too long and in fact it is now more a matter of fashion than anything else. I like scarves and jackets and boots. I am tired of planning for heavy perspiration on the subway.
This picture was taken moments after I finished reading Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida and I just happened to have a camera with me. Looking at the images- the buildings and the people one can see a 20th century kind of fashion. The images of our time make us dead. When we take a picture we know it will live past us and to someone in the future and it will be history. Here I would like to direct you to the blog of my dear friends Stefano and Falcone:

Now think about this statement: “I could read my nonexistence in the clothes my mother had worn before I can remember her.” This is from Barthes’ Camera Lucida. The images on my friends’ blog are records of history when we will no longer remember what people looked like. In fact according to Barthes the photograph erases the need to remember. Now that photograph of Manhattan is a week old and my day spent in the park has nothing to do with the image we see here. So then, do the fashions we see on people or the expressions they present us with in photographs have anything to do with their lives? I need to think about this more. Barthes and I both have a problem understanding photography as an art form. We can take photos as the highest art or as completely artless: “I perceive the referent (here, the photograph really transcends itself: is this not the sole proof of its art? To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself.”