Details, Details

Before it comes off the stands... The August 2008 issue of DETAILS printed a few Volume images to illustrate a lovely piece by Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon. Clearly I need to add Oakley Hall's Warlock to my reading list. No reason to be sadder than necessary.

Marine Wedding Revisited

Nina Berman's iconic image from the Marine Wedding series has been extensively published and written about. We all agree - it is one of the most profound, important photographs of our time. I truly love this image. This morning I was reading old entries on the Hey Hot Shot! blog and came across Tyler Ziegel and Renee: one year on, published in The Sunday Times last May. 

My brain knows much more than I do.

Clearly. At the moment I am photographing Columbia's Psychology Library, working on a proposal for the University of Florida's new Biomedical Sciences building (squeak squeak!), re-reading the vision chapter in A Natural History of the Senses, and yesterday stumbled upon a brilliant article in The New Yorker about insight and the brain by Jonah Lehrer that you want to read. Unfortunately it is not available online, so you'll have to pick up the July 28 issue if you want to read it... Below is an excerpt to wet your appetite. 

"The most mysterious aspect of insight is not revelation itself but what happens next. The brain is an infinite library of associations, a cacophony of competing ideas, and yet, as soon as the right association appears, we know. The new thought, represented by that rush of gamma rays in the right hemisphere, immediately grabs our attention. There is something paradoxical and bizarre about this. On one hand, an epiphany is a surprising event; we are startled by what we've just discovered. Some part of our brain, however, clearly isn't surprised at all , which is why we are able to instantly recognize the insight. 'As soon as the insight happens, it just seems so obvious,' Schooler said. 'People can't believe they didn't see it before.' "

It's Google Stoopid

In the process of working on the Volume project, I have seen my subjects start to slip away into storage, deep storage, and in recent months, into dumpsters. Despite the prevalence of the Internet, people are often shocked to hear the books are actually being taken from their shelves. As Nicholson Baker told us the way of the bound newspapers in Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper , Nicholas Carr has written a new book I can't wait to read. In the first few paragraphs Atlantic article he sets the stage from his personal experience as a writer, "Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes." The book is called The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google.