Shane Lavalette is a photographer currently living in Cambridge, MA, studying for a degree from Tufts University and The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. When Shane is not making photographs, he is writing about them. His Journal, which has one of the highest readerships of photography-related blogs, focuses primarily on fine art photography and issues concerning contemporary photographic practice. Shane is also the co-editor of Remain in Light, a new publication of photography.
Shane Lavalette's Top Ten
10. Seinfeld: A brilliant sitcom "about nothing." Yada yada yada.
9. Radio Bean: Perhaps the most wonderful little coffee shop in the whole world. You might have to wear flannel, play the banjo or appreciate wine racks made of bedsprings to adore it like I do. Located in Burlington, Vermont.
8. Neutral Milk Hotel's In An Aeroplane Over the Sea: As Taylor Clark explains in an article for Slate, it's "a concept album about Anne Frank in which vocals about lost Siamese twins and semen-stained mountaintops mingle with the sounds of musical saws, fuzzy tape loops, and an amateur psychedelic brass band." Thank you, Jeff Mangum, for this work of art.
7. The smell of last night's campfire on today's clothing.
6. Roland Barthes: Literary critic, social theorist, philosopher, and semiotician… the man who gave us Camera Lucida.
5. "somewhere i have never traveled" by E.E. Cummings:
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
4. Bach's Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major (Prelude) as played by Yo Yo Ma
6/13/08
Shane Lavalette's Top Ten
