Infra-Politics & Photography

The thing about infrastructure is that it never just does what it’s supposedly designed to do. Infrastructure congeals and conceals social interest. It’s “inevitably imbued with biased struggles for social, economic, ecological, and political power to benefit from connecting (more or less) distant times and places” (Graham and Marvin, 2001). In other words, “one person’s infrastructure is another’s difficulty” (Starr, 1999). Highways, dams, and pipelines have always been flashpoints of protest when they displace and disrupt lifeways and communities; they leverage the same logic as that of nuclear “sacrifice zones” – those spectacular feats of dispossession for the national good, … Continue reading “Infra-Politics & Photography”

The Meaning of 888

For years, a running joke I told was that I was born on Antichristmas—June 25, the symbolic antipode of Christmas Day. And while the season’s greetings I text my friends have become a lot less sarcastic, I am beginning to see a lesson in the turning of that wheel, again & again, and the spiral path it’s made. As a species we seem to be formed by contrast. “Kikhhh,” the Lebanese mother will sound out to the child who has tried to taste something he’d picked up off the ground, establishing his boundary between clean and unclean. If this line … Continue reading “The Meaning of 888”

The Meaning of Six Six Six

And what spot does X mark? X is you and I, the coming together of diagonals—an intersection and ideal symbol for the very search for meaning. X can mean the unknown variable or the buried loot at the center of a treasure map; X is both a placeholder and a destination—a deliberate holding pattern, or, perhaps, a refusal to land on familiar terms. In our cultural consciousness, we have Generation X, The X-Files, and Malcom X. Let your eyes shift back & forth between these correspondences. Contemplate their polarities—if strange patterns emerge, what you are now experiencing is what Umberto … Continue reading “The Meaning of Six Six Six”