Alexandra Gajewsi writes of Michael Camille's posthumous book on the gargoyles of Notre Dame:

The gargoyles are a tombstone set by modernity upon the medieval past which will never be fully recoverable. Instead of providing a link with the past, they look to the future with each generation, including ourselves, who project into them fears and aspirations that are always new because they are always changing. The book is illustrated with hundreds of photos and often otherwise little-known illustrations and paintings that support its arguments. Deeply provocative but always engaging and witty, and presenting a highly philosophical argument with great humanity and warmth, the Gargoyles of Notre-Dame is beautifully written. It is not the first time that a reviewer of one of Camille’s books concludes that the subject, in this case Notre-Dame and indeed medieval art more generally, will not be the same again.

Bill Cunningham New York

Navasky on Zelizer's About to Die

From The Nation: "[Zelizer] rightly emphasizes that most journalists and academics have generally assumed that words are more important than pictures or images; that the main function of news pictures is to document or illustrate words; and that most editors regard pictures as “softer” than words. Of the bureau chief who remarked, “Words can go deeper than pictures,” she writes, “This disregard for the image has buttressed a default understanding of news as primarily rational information relay that uses words as its main vehicle and implicitly frames images as contaminating, blurring, or at the very least offsetting journalism’s reliance on straight reason.” Of academics like Jürgen Habermas and Karl Popper, who have acknowledged the power of images, she argues that they seem “irritated” because they believe that “affect, the emotions, and passion,” which may be aroused by images, “undermine the development of the reasoned public that journalism is expected to bolster.” About to Die is a refutation of this “words matter and images don’t” perspective. As Zelizer sees it, words may be rightfully valued for reasons related to logic and evidence, but rationality, facts and information offer an incomplete picture, so to speak, of an event. Images can “bypass the intellect to engage the emotions,” offering instead what she calls “implicative relays, suggestive slices of action that people need to complete by interpreting and imagining.”

Stan Douglas - Midcentury Studio @ David Zwirner

From the Zwirner website: "Stan Douglas...chronicles the burgeoning discipline of press photography in North America during the postwar period. Douglas has assumed the role of a fictional, anonymous photographer to create a series of images hypothetically produced between 1945-1951. To do so, he constructed a veritable “midcentury studio” using authentic equipment as well as actors to produce carefully staged, black-and-white photographs that painstakingly emulate the period’s obsession with drama, “caught-in-the-moment” crime-scenes, curious and exotic artifacts, magicians, fashion, dance, gambling, and technology."