About Fred Buell:

I’ve been a poet and literary critic; then a cultural historian; and finally a photographer. In the process. I have tried to understand the relationships between writing poetry and making photographs.

Though poetry, aspiring to the ideal, was long considered one of the highest of the arts, and photography, confined to the real, was long thought not to be an art at all, I see the two as equals.

For the real requires art to be made to feel real in a photograph or a poem. And the ideal—think beauty, love, inspiration—also requires art to be made to feel real.

Capturing elegance or ugliness in either genre demands artfulness. There are aesthetics of cruelty as well as loveliness, of outrage as well as compassion. The creation of sensations of boredom and inspiration in either words or images is hard indeed.

Though the word “aesthetic” today has become a term of dishonor rather than honor (critiqued as a term that masks illegitimate social inequality), I define it as having nothing to do with “refinement” or status.

Rather, the aesthetic has its clearest meaning as the polar opposite of the anesthetic. And both the most lyrical of poets and the most nitty-gritty of street photographers and photojournalists face equally difficult aesthetic challenges in making their “captures” moving and/or powerful.

And they face similar great challenges in not being anesthetic in a time where huge waves of banal or merely ingenious words and images inundate them at every turn, each time they turn on electronic devices or wander out into urbanized landscapes.

For there is a big difference between having your faculties be unexercised and put to sleep and having your physical senses, your social acumen, your understandings of people’s or creatures’ otherness, your emotions, your intellect at its most wry, nimble, ironic or probing, and your animal and/or transcendental spirits truly awakened.

So let’s go for the aesthetic, not the anesthetic.