Comments on: Aaron Blum – A Guide To Folk Taxonomy https://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2016/09/aaron-blum-a-guide-to-folk-taxonomy/ burn is an online feature for emerging photographers worldwide. burn is curated by magnum photographer david alan harvey. Mon, 07 Nov 2016 21:28:52 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2.4 By: Hiroshi Okamoto – Recruit « burn magazine https://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2016/09/aaron-blum-a-guide-to-folk-taxonomy/#comment-1295154 Thu, 15 Sep 2016 11:43:30 +0000 http://www.burnmagazine.org/?p=50087#comment-1295154 […] Hiroshi Okamoto […]

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By: ablum https://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2016/09/aaron-blum-a-guide-to-folk-taxonomy/#comment-1295131 Tue, 13 Sep 2016 19:08:41 +0000 http://www.burnmagazine.org/?p=50087#comment-1295131 Hello Skiwaves,
All the salamanders are actually a big part of the origin of the project. There are more species in Appalachia than any where else on earth. It is because of the hills and how they become isolated that there are so many variations. This is one of the inspirations for the project.

This is the excerpt that accompanies one of them in the book I am working on for this project.

As a child I would explore the small creeks and streams around my home in hopes of capturing salamanders. When I would succeed I would hold them in my hands and admire their slender bodies and beauty. I could not have imagined that they would become an essential aspect of my understanding of Appalachian culture. There are more salamander species in Appalachia than anywhere else on earth. The isolated mountains and recesses transformed them like the finches of the Galapagos, each one different in shape, color, and ability. Some so secluded the entire population is confined to a particular rock or tree or county. How then does this place, these hills, affect a person? How then do the mountains mold us?

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By: mschacter https://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2016/09/aaron-blum-a-guide-to-folk-taxonomy/#comment-1295129 Tue, 13 Sep 2016 14:53:42 +0000 http://www.burnmagazine.org/?p=50087#comment-1295129 The fairground photograph is lovely!

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By: skiwaves https://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2016/09/aaron-blum-a-guide-to-folk-taxonomy/#comment-1295128 Tue, 13 Sep 2016 14:01:04 +0000 http://www.burnmagazine.org/?p=50087#comment-1295128 Nice photos Aaron. You live in a beautiful part of the country.
One question is why all the salamander shots? The portraits of people are good, but showing some in their daily life working or passing time, rather than posed looking into the camera, might be more insightful. Captions would be helpful to understand and tie things together.

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By: bob black https://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2016/09/aaron-blum-a-guide-to-folk-taxonomy/#comment-1295124 Tue, 13 Sep 2016 09:14:15 +0000 http://www.burnmagazine.org/?p=50087#comment-1295124 akin to my beloved Charles Wrights poetry……..Aaron’s work is lyrical and richly complex, and i would argue much more complex that it’s ‘easy beauty’ surface…i mean, the pictures are beautiful and yet, the have such a layered complexity to them that belies their straight forward surface…..and i love the photograph of the woman with glasses: her expression, as if a reanimation of a C.D. Wright poem…

there is so much beauty in this project…in aaron;s work, in the discipline of taxonomy….the set the grace of things by our inimical need to categorize, even that which resists such strains…..

and David, don’t get upset with me, but Aaron’s work is infinitely more wise and powerful and insightful than Bruce’s silly cliche that he pinned for VICE last year…more insight and mystery here…and most important, he tangles the incredibly RICH LITERARY TRADITION of that area: the oral tradition of songs and tales and music….its profoundly biblical orientation…not to wonder that Cormac Mccarthy’s first takes place there…..this work stands along Peter Van Agtamel’s and some of the work by Soth, as most beautiful and haunted and complex of that I’ve seen tackling Appalachia….

It’s fabulous to see the work here…thrilling….

this magical light, channeling Terrence Mallick, Moonshine and the Moths that sift upon our hearts…….

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The Appalachian Book of the Dead Related Poem Content Details

Sunday, September Sunday … Outdoors,
Like an early page from The Appalachian Book of the Dead,
Sunlight lavishes brilliance on every surface,
Doves settle, surreptitious angels, on tree limb and box branch,
A crow calls, deep in its own darkness,
Something like water ticks on
Just there, beyond the horizon, just there, steady clock …

Go in fear of abstractions …
Well, possibly. Meanwhile,
They are the strata our bodies rise through, the sere veins
Our skins rub off on.
For instance, whatever enlightenment there might be
Housels compassion and affection, those two tributaries
That river above our lives,
Whose waters we sense the sense of
late at night, and later still.

Uneasy, suburbanized,
I drift from the lawn chair to the back porch to the dwarf orchard
Testing the grass and border garden.
A stillness, as in the passageways of Paradise,
Bell jars the afternoon.
Leaves, like ex votos, hang hard and shine
Under the endlessness of heaven.
Such skeletal altars, such vacant sanctuary.

It always amazes me
How landscape recalibrates the stations of the dead,
How what we see jacks up
the odd quotient of what we don’t see,
How God’s breath reconstitutes our walking up and walking down.
First glimpse of autumn, stretched tight and snicked, a bad face lift,
Flicks in and flicks out,
a virtual reality.
Time to begin the long division.
–Charles Wright

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By: mw https://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2016/09/aaron-blum-a-guide-to-folk-taxonomy/#comment-1295121 Mon, 12 Sep 2016 17:02:32 +0000 http://www.burnmagazine.org/?p=50087#comment-1295121 I thought this looked familiar. You can see an alternate edit here: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/another-side-of-appalachia

It brings home the point that Blum’s work does not contain the usual poverty-pornish tropes about Appalachia, but rather shows it more from the perspective of a middle class resident.

By way of contrast, the article links to this story that discusses Appalachian stereotypes, and some of the larger, associated problems of documentary photography. http://www.americansuburbx.com/2015/05/kate-fowler-appalachia-as-other-stacy-kranitz.html

That link also contains some stunning photos of the kind we are more accustomed to seeing:

In addition to subverting the tropes, which imo are badly in need of subverting; I think it brings up questions about dramatic vs. non-dramatic photography, and does a little subversion in that context as well.

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By: Imants https://www.burnmagazine.org/essays/2016/09/aaron-blum-a-guide-to-folk-taxonomy/#comment-1295119 Mon, 12 Sep 2016 13:03:39 +0000 http://www.burnmagazine.org/?p=50087#comment-1295119 Essays such as this mud country …this is not real life …Bills essay. ….west seem to work better in this format that burn presents the story telling is just that much more poignant and refined. The camera and the photographers vision rule as opposed to so many of the EPF finalists that present ….What could be.

The incomplete does not equate to quality

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