documenting the desk

This is a fairly average desktop tangle on a day when I'm teaching a grad course on literature and visual culture, and prepare an undergrad class on writing and photography - in fact, come to think of it, it's somewhat bare of the books that are piled up just out of view.   It's an everyday image that looks to these classes in other ways.   We were discussing Detail in the grad class today - what constitutes a meaningful detail, what an incidental one (though Barthes's warning that either everything has meaning, or nothing has, was firmly present in the room, too) - and one could ask this of the desk.   Clearly, the clue, the way in, is that copy of Camera Obscura.   Only its presence there is not, in fact, a determinative one - it was floating around after I took a reference from it for something quite other earlier...

...which brings one to the problems of documentary, which we're turning to later in the week.   And this is very much an image that constitutes documentary by my criteria - a Szarkowski understanding, "that the commonplace is really worth looking at," rather than a more traditional understanding of documentary as exposing unfair, unequal power relations, as investigating poverty and hardship.   This picture - and I'm borrowing from Martha Rosler's argument, is, despite being unposed, un-arranged, quite definitely more governed by aesthetics than driven by even the faintest whisper of a radical idea.   All the same, it's a ghost from a kind of documentary project that I began and abandoned at the start of the year: to take a picture of the desk at which I sat down to work every morning (*every* morning??).   The other project(besides the Image of the Day) that I began, though, has been happily continuing - a picture taken every day out of the window nearest me when I wake up (including airplane windows, etc).   But what does this repetition constitute a documentary of, exactly?   Maybe I'll return to that one when I have all 365 days...

That is not, I want to point out, an extraordinarily grubby window, but one that has a thin mesh screen on it...at least, I'll stick to that description...