Adam Vinueza

The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time; a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination, a mad image, chafed by reality. –Barthes, in Camera Lucida; p. 115 Barthes is elusive about the punctum—the “piercing” aspect of some photographs that affect him—but part of what he seems to be getting at is something mad about the relationship between spectator and object (he calls it the “spectrum”) in photography. ...

It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographic form. Today everything exists to end in a photograph. –Susan Sontag, “In Plato’s Cave”, from On Photography; p. 24. ...

After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved–but this solved neither the problem of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of the stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. ...

The backstory Ten years ago, I was in fantastic shape. I was running most days, roughly 40+ miles per week, and I could run a sub-21-minute 5K. Then I injured my hip, and was essentially unable to run for several months. Since then it was almost impossible for me to get back into a stable routine. Life intervened: the kids grew up and left home; I changed jobs a couple of times; and then COVID hit, like a tsunami. ...