Thursday, February 12, 2009

Nerve : The First 10 Years



Just got this book in the mail last week, Nerve: The First 10 Years, published by Chronicle Books. Kind of beautiful with this pink plastic glow-in-the-day cover jacket...and the design is challenging in all the right ways.
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Back before Rachel Hulin was the voice that we all know as Rachel Hulin, she was the photo editor at Nerve. Somehow we crossed pathes as I was trying to promote my book Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews. Nerve published an exerpt that led to great publicity around the time of the exhibition and the rest is photographic history...or something like that. Seeing the work now in this anthology feels kind of like watching a rerun of The Brady Bunch...it's familiar, kind of fun to see it packaged a little differently...but there is ennui...I've seen it before and the sense of accomplishment just isn't there. Last year two images from Echolilia were published in the Hijacked Volume One anthology and I was gaga...new life for a new project! Let's see if it looks different on the page than it does on my wall! I just lingered over it and would revisit it over and over. I couldn't put the book away.
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So what's the lesson? I guess it is obvious: pushing the new stuff is exciting, the sense of discovery when something is recognized is addictive...the uphill battle is more fun than coasting downhill....all of those things at once.

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