73. That's a Pretty Good Tree

One of us came out of an Omaha used bookstore with a $25 book on Henri Cartier-Bresson, after passing up a $75 Martin Parr on the display. Reading about a photographer who came from money lands differently in a tight month. His weekly drop of new finds at a vintage shop, the other suggests, has taken the place of the shoot-and-post cycle that can be toxic to photography. His YouTube video predicting that Apple will bring back its Aperture software went from 800 views at bedtime to 25,000 by morning, a thrill that sits oddly next to a thin business account. Then we read to each other. Cartier-Bresson spent whole days on the streets, tense and ready to spring, and suspected that only children could still express themselves freely. John Ruskin measures an artist by how many great ideas his work holds. In Proust's Swann's Way, a phrase of music makes Swann want to start his life over. The longest stretch is Italo Calvino's essay on the written city, where words on a wall, which nobody can avoid reading, amount to a kind of tyranny. The talk turns to yard signs and sports flags crowding a walk that should be about the birds. It ends on the husks of old trees one of us photographs like tombstones, including a 12-foot trunk stripped of every limb that has started growing back. Mentioned in this episode: Henri Cartier-Bresson, Martin Parr, Peter Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, Apple's Aperture, John Ruskin's Modern Painters, David Lynch's Catching the Big Fish, Marcel Proust's Swann's Way, Italo Calvino's Collection of Sand, Jackson Street Booksellers. -Ai Support the show If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a rating and/or a review. We appreciate and try to read all of them. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode. Ask Us a Question: https://studiosessionspod.com/#ask Website: https://studiosessionspod.com