jeffcagle:
“And you know, our founders, if you read their speeches and their documents and their letters to each other, when they founded our country, they all said it would happen if the people turned to God.
“So let’s take them as people who knew what they were talking about. What do you say we give the whole ‘let’s turn back to God’ thing a try and see what happens?” - Glenn Beck
Really? How about the real letters:
“And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors.”
-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823 [via]
And
“Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.”
-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814 [via]
I agree very much with this post but I want to introduce another angle: Should the founding fathers be treated like gospel? (No pun intended.) I can very much accept that we can still go back to writings from the 18th century and derive wisdom from them but shouldn’t we continually try to improve? Thomas Jefferson, non-christian deist and smart guy that he was, had slaves. Shouldn’t we stop for a moment and wonder whether we should be holding such a guy unquestionably up as a model?
But then, if Glenn Beck is really into the Bible he know it’s okay to have slaves as long as they’re not of your own people.
Some photographers kept multiple themes in their heads and add to them gradually as they come across more and more picture subjects that fit. Lee Friedlander photographed that way for many years—he had various ideas, and, whenever he’d get another picture that fit a particular one, he’d literally throw it in a box with the others.
So, I thought I had exhausted my local library of photobooks but a lucky mistake lead me to find that was not the case. Dropping by to borrow a copy of Gerry Johansson’s Sverige I got Johansson confused with another Swedish photographer, Lars Tunbjörk. Turns out the library had two more Tunbjörk books than I had thought, one of which I really wanted to see. The funny thing was that the Tunbjörk books were in different locations of the library and neither of them sorted into the section Johansson’s book belongs to.
Even stranger, Tunbjörk’s I Love Borås was in the geography section while his book Landet utom sig was in the biography section. The photography in both would definitely fall within the same genre and – apart from the tone of the photographs, I guess – the main difference is that Landet utom sig contains a couple of essays while I Love Borås is presented without any text. The same goes for Johansson’s Sverige but, if anything, a couple of essays along with the photos seems pretty much standard in photobooks.
Remarkably enough, however, Sverige ends up under “Pn” in the SAB system of classification. That’s photography or something like that. I’ve been running Google all over trying to find more out about this classification system and I’ve given up. (Sweden seems not to be friends with Mr. Dewey.) So, being curious – or perhaps flabbergasted is a better word – I asked the librarian manning the info desk why these books weren’t all in the same place. The conversation left me just as frustrated. One point is, though, that apparently the publishers seem to have some say in how they end up being catalogued. But also, she stated that Gerry Johansson’s work in Sverige is “technical photography” – as opposed to what I can’t remember. The fact that Tunbjörk’s work in I Love Borås is pretty much street photography, yet that book ends up in the geography section, while Johansson’s Sverige could be labelled a topographical account only makes this weirder.
I don’t know if I’m just being prejudiced as a photographer or if this really is a silly way of sorting books but I’m pretty sure this must have been the lamest subject of a rant on Tumblr for a while.
