The Photographer

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Ariel Goldberg’s photographer might be an essayist, philosopher, or performance artist, or they might well be you, a twenty-first-century citizen caught in the crossfire of electronic media sharing, from ubiquitous selfies capturing the minutiae of people’s lives to whistle-blowing stills leaked during wartime. In an age when anyone with a smartphone is a potential photojournalist, what separates a framed composition from real life, a chance snapshot from a monumental expose? You’ll find a panorama of bracing responses here in Goldberg’s genre- defying texts, including confessional alt captions for irretrievable images, epistolary meditations on the unusual ways photos are viewed today, a discursive press conference that questions photographic permission, and a campy garage-sale lecture on the obsolescence of camera accessories–all underscored by the keen, enigmatic voice of a present-day photographer who knows the tricks of the trade but holds to a credo of candor, who contends both voluntarily and involuntarily with what Susan Sontag called ‘an ethics of seeing.’–Pamela Lu