Andrew Schroeder

Just a couple of things on the back burner(s):

1. Jorg Colberg has a great recent post that includes the thought that all photographs exploit their subject matter. I’m not quite sure this is always the case. I’m more inclined to believe that the connections between photograph and subject (and viewer) are less exploitative than made out to be. Instead, this connection is more of a dialogue – something less cut and dry and more like the relationship between producers and consumers explored by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life.

2. Google +. I’m on it and it is a strange feeling – much like going to a party, arriving early, and then finding out other guests might now be coming. But this did get me back into reading about Jürgen Habermaas and his ideas regarding the emergence of public space. Habermaas wrote about the role newly emergent 18th century European public spaces played in the rise of a new political class. I guess, I’m a little creeped out how quickly we seem to have evacuated ourselves from physical public space to enter into virtualized, electronic, privately-owned public space.

It appears that within American culture, there are three times it is acceptable for a man to be an enthusiastic gardener: either when young in rural Nebraska, when in one’s late 60s, or when one is British. Although I am technically none of the above, I am incredibly thrilled by the variety of things growing this summer.
I’ve been somewhat of a flake when it comes to the actual work, but I have had the extreme pleasure of sharing a community garden plot with two good friends. The concept of urban gardening is truly something that any resident of a major city should not take for granted. As I was walking around the garden this afternoon taking photos, I started to wonder about the evolutionary effects of our species movement to urban areas will have on the plants we bring with us. Will we engineer and come to favor planting pollution resistant variants of spinach? Or, instead of changes to the plants we tend, will our cities take on the positive qualities, biodiversity and egalitarian aura of the average garden?