“Flipping through piles of photography books at the Brooklyn Public Library, I came upon a cyanotype by Henri Le Secq, entitled Farmyard Scene, near St.-Leu-d’Esserent, dated 1852. Through the blue murk you can pick out bucolic details. Roof thatching, a barrel, some crates. The building on the right appears built into the hillside, its roof indistinguishable from a rock that arches into the center of the image before disappearing into shadow. The shadow is large and blue and bores through the center of the image like a tunnel. It is supposedly a scene, but there is no activity, no focal point. Only this blind blue space between two buildings. Only nothing but blue.”

ben tapeworm, Photo Blues, 2025

Photo Blues is an essay about photography during COVID, vis-à-vis various blues

Copies can be purchased here.

Photo Blues by ben tapeworm 

“Returning to the Kentucky landscape of my childhood and most importantly to the hills, I am able to reclaim a sublime understanding that living in harmony with the earth renews the spirit. Coming home to live in Kentucky was for me a journey back to a place where I felt I belonged. But it was also returning to a place that I felt needed me and my resources, a place where I as a citizen could be in community with other folk seeking to revive and renew our local environ-ment, seeking to have fidelity to a place. Living engagement with both a specific place and the issue of sustainability, we know and understand that we are living lives of interdependence.”

Bell Hooks, Belonging, 2009

“When art trumpets that it does not have an emotional or spiritual facet—that is an aberrant or marginal phenomenon.”

- Henry Flynt,
from On Spirituality & Art

“I was thinking about the freedom that comes with feeling that one has finished a project—a recording, a tour, a piece of writing—to one’s satisfaction and that the road ahead is clear to embark upon something that feels different, and that you’re not tackling the same ideas over and over again.  That’s one reason why I’ve always liked toggling between different working situations—solo, duo, group and largely composed versus largely improvised methods.  To start again, differently, afresh—that’s always the dream.”

- David Grubbs

More

Recorded in 1981 in the studios at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, this beautifully rendered track by Cheri Knight unfurls with the kind of shimmering undulations that artists like Yasuaki Shimizu were capturing around the same time. The music bristles with the raw spirit of DIY experimentation of that period of music-making. The other single from this work, Prime Numbers, is similarly wonderful.