Od Review

Review / Looking up Ben James: A Fable / John Gossage

Review / Halfstory Halflife / Raymond Meeks

Halfstory Halflife

Photographs by Raymond Meeks  Chose Commune, Paris, France, 2018 144 pp., 78 black and white photographs, 21.5 x 28 cm 50€

The poet and photo historian John Wood once wrote a poem about “the bathers”—all those paintings of young men or young women, nurtured by “summer days and shimmering pools where innocence itself once bathed in embracing lengths of providing light.” He was…

v3.13 / Brenton Hamilton: All Speaks of Change

The end of November, 1807. He’d been writing like a man possessed. He’d seen into the nature of Nature! The element, Potassium. Sodium too. Neither of which had been isolated before Humphry Davy, our man of the hour, jolted a bit of potash with a few determined volts.

Davy was an amateur in the classic sense—a lover of a great many things. Among his affinities were electricity (first and…

v3.12 / Diane Fenster & the Wandering Womb

In 2017, photographer Diane Fenster was diagnosed with Stage 1 endometrial cancer. A complete hysterectomy followed, and after that, a series of wondrous images about the essence of femininity. Where does it reside? In those two ounces of tissue removed by the surgery? In one’s memories, like the phosphorescent core of a glacier? Or does it wander the imagination, never stopping long enough to…

v3.11 / Philip LePage & the Third Still

“How much do you love me?” asks a girl in Haruki Murakami‘s very short, short story (see below). The boy responds, not by gathering her to his arms, not with the fidelity of his kiss, but with the only other thing commensurate to love’s interminable estates: the measure of his own loneliness.

“How much do you love me?” she asks. “As much as a train whistle in the night,” he says.

It’s not an…

v3.10 / Patricia A. Bender’s Euclidean Pursuits

What is it about some shapes—simple, play-school-building-block shapes—that defies our failing attention spans? There’s the moon, round as it was the first time I saw it, and just as intoxicating. Here’s a triangular leaf, like all the other leaves I’ve seen. I pick it up anyway and press it in my book. And again, I sit down to write. The squares of the laptop keys beautifully repeat a boxy…

v3.9 / A Familiar Disorder: The Art of Peggy Washburn

“Then I reflected that all things happen, happen to one, precisely now. Century follows century, and things happen only in the present. There are countless men in the air, on land and at sea, and all that really happens happens to me.”—Jorge Luis Borges

To talk about Peggy Washburn’s photography, you have to talk about time. That makes me nervous—because I have this mushy gray clock in my head…

v3.8 / John Singletary & the Common Heart

There are creatures in the sea that throb and undulate so much like the human heart that the first wet steps of our aqueous foremothers seem inevitable. In their search for the origin of the heart’s beat, scientists look to sea anemones and their archaic fibrillations for clues. Watching them (on YouTube) waltz through the darkness, without ego or direction, aglow with the dance of their own…

v3.7 / Prior to Light: Nadezda Nikolova-Kratzer’s Elemental Forms

—contemplatio in calgine divina

“Do not think technology first: rocket and the lift off of the rocket. Look instead, like in the depths of a closed eye, into the opacity of knowledge where, forming one with it, the rocket passes through infinite distances. Think according to the knowledge that steers the rocket as if in a dream, heavier and more transparent than the boundless night it penetrates…

v3.6 / Where Nothing Subsists: The Art of Marc Sirinsky

In Swann’s Way, the inexhaustible Marcel Proust writes, “When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still alone, more fragile, more unsubstantial, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time . . . like souls amid the ruins waiting and hoping for their moment, souls in whose tiny, almost impalpable drop of essen…

v3.5 / Amanda Tinker’s Fragile Fantasies

The serpents are on their way to oblivion. Petals leap against the dark arcs of hawkmoths. And all the while, the mind’s architect opens her hands, as the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously wrote, “to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth” to these “shadows of imagination”—to extend what we would extend to no other fantasy: our own “willing suspension of…

v3.3 / Diana Nicholette Jeon & the Book of Visions

“Whether or not the stories are ‘true’ is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.” These words preface Carl Jung’s autobiography, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections (1962). But they could just as easily precede the photographs in this feature. In little oneiric albums, each conceived as a diptych, Diana Nicholette Jeon reflects on personal and shared…

One of the first descriptions of a migraine aura comes to us from the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates who said of the person experiencing the aura, “He seemed to see something shining before him like a light, usually in part of the right eye; at the end of a moment, a violent pain supervened in the right temple, then in all the head and neck.” Though Hippocrates recorded this strange…