Felicia Honkasalo, Grey Cobalt, 2019

Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories, Volume 4

The Blonde Witch (1956) dir. André Michel

Imogen Cunningham, Magnolia Blossom, 1925

Enzo Ragazzini, Illustration used for the cover of R.D. Laing’s Sanity, Madness and the Family, 1970

“Ruth, Roses and Revolvers”
Man Ray, Los Angeles 1942-44
[gelatin silver print | 24.9 × 19.8 cm.]

“This image illustrated a story by Man Ray in the journal View, and it was later used as the basis for a segment of Hans Richter's 1948 film Dreams That Money Can Buy. The film’s noir atmosphere of the photograph suggests the influence of Hollywood on Man Ray, who was living in Los Angeles when he made it. Interested in filmmaking but not in the collaborative process of studio-produced movies, Man Ray turned down offers to work as a cameraman.”

We have at last come to realize that neither the soils, the oceans, nor the atmosphere can be comprehended without taking into account the participation of innumerable organisms, from the lichens that crumble rocks, and the bacterial entities that decompose organic detritus, to all the respiring plants and animals exchanging vital gases with the air. The notion of earthly nature as a densely interconnected organic network—a “biospheric web” wherein each entity draws its specific character from its relations, direct and indirect, to all the others—has today become commonplace, and it converges neatly with Merleau-Ponty’s late denoscription of sensuous reality, “the Flesh,” as an intertwined, and actively intertwining, lattice of mutually dependent phenomena, both sensorial and sentient, of which our own sensing bodies are a part.

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous