Rare Books
"In Ezawa, the mysterious power of photography and the compulsion to take photos can almost be likened to character traits in a person, whose biography he is writing with his digital drawings in 'The history of photography remix.' Here, the great deeds and dramas of photography are evaluated from an, if not historical, then at least medial distance: was it photography's purpose to protect spontaneous life, or did it insert difference and distance? Did it serve to keep the institutions of Meaning, Tradition, and History in place, or did the unique moment that it tore out of time's normal passage make for a revolutionary contingency? What historical signification is accumulated in photography? ... Ezawa's drawings inhabit the traditional paradoxes of photography, not least the one that his 'History of photography remix' is at the same time radically mediated and radically subjective. In his almost airtight digital drawings, no Ubenhagen der Kultur seeps in; of course there are nukes, Nazis and terrorists, but there are also flowers, surfers and Cindy Sherman. What is right or wrong is simply not the question, and aggression as well as desire is out of the picture. It is exactly this absence, not of criteria but of judgment, that reflects the attempt at inhabiting a culture whose main feature is uncertainty and the fear of it. In this way, Ezawa's remix of the history of photography is also a (self-)portrayal of the flux of contemporary life, and the attempt at inhabiting it"--From introduction.
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