Just posted a review of Vincent Peal’s excellent new photo book RITES & CEREMONIES: ”Let’s face the music and dance… These people’s approaches are very different from the consensus Western ones. We can clearly see that the ecstatic moment desired or needed to be able to transcend and enter the NUMINOUS seemingly needs a colorful, traditional and most often communal approach. The mechanics seem almost the same in all of these circumstances: upheave the normal mind-frame, shock the system, jolt the perceptions, and be temporarily free within these sacred and confined times and spaces. The mythic and strictly religious-symbolic trappings are essentially secondary. What these strange men and women do might just might be PURE religion in the most literal sense.” #vincentpeal #timelessedition #ritesandceremonies #huntingasia #occulture #carlabrahamsson

In today’s Magic Monday at our Patreon, I write about how some pilgrimages can bring more than you bargained for: ”Here’s the main insight: if we flip the script of analysis and look at this not as a causal camera trip via esthetic titillation but as a psychoanalytical journey proper, our bounty is more than a (pardon the pun that is not a pun) ”memory card” filled with said slices. Instead, it becomes pure fodder for analysis and many insights. What do we look at? Why? And how is that connected to… What, exactly? Of course one can just go and snap away, happy about spending time in a photographic paradise. But looking at the process as such in this magico-analytic way (definitely under the umbrella of what I’ve called ”Chimera Obscura”), the images in themselves are no longer general observations and documentations but actually particular revelations within a psychic grid. Because to ”take” a picture is to (un)consciously make a choice, a selection. And there’s always a reason why we...

Do you have your ticket for my new class The Legacy of Horror? ”These films do not offer the comfort of resolution. The monsters are not slain. The characters are not healed. Instead, they emphasize the persistence of suffering—and the thin line between coping and collapse. Trauma horror asks the audience to dwell in discomfort, to sit with grief, guilt, and ambiguity. It replaces catharsis with confrontation.” In four illustrated online live sessions, I will talk about the development of cultural expressions dealing with our psychological-emotional need to be terrified (by proxy/culture). It’s apparently not enough to be victims of disasters and psychopaths – we need to reli(e)ve the traumas by making up similar scenarios that we can share and process together in order to be rid of them. But can we ever, and do we really want to? It’s the most ambitious class I’ve developed yet, and I look forward to seeing you there. Q & A after each session, of course. Come...

Just posted a loving appreciation of Diane Arbus. The exhibition at the Met in NYC in 2005 is still the best art thing I’ve EVER been to: ”The question of exploitation versus empathy in Arbus’s work cannot be definitively resolved, and perhaps this irresolvability is part of what gives her photographs their continuing power. They exist in an uncomfortable space between document and art, between compassion and voyeurism, between revealing and projecting. This ambiguity reflects larger questions about photography itself as a medium that both captures and constructs reality, that promises truth while trafficking in surfaces.” #dianearbus #anartapart #carlabrahamsson