![]() ![]() Affinities gathers close readings of various images-photographs, collages, footage of dance performances or microscopic matter, all that blinds and blinks and twinkles-that have bewitched the author in some way. But it is done in pursuit of wonder and astonishment, something that must have felt urgent at the time. I fancied I could memorize these photographs like poems.” Such a “monkish task,” he acknowledges, is “idiotic,” naive, perhaps privileged withdrawn from community, people, politics. The Irish critic Brian Dillon, in his new essay collection, Affinities: On Art and Fascination, describes a similar obsession that consumed him around the same time: an idea that he would spend these new, strange hours in isolation staring at images and that “they would go to work on me, leach into soul or sensibility. It must have seemed like a sad way to pass the time, but the obsessive scrutiny seemed important. ![]() ![]() ![]() I played quizzes where you would look at photographs taken on the street and have to guess the neighborhood. I would wander around Brooklyn on Google Maps, memorizing the order of avenues and streets. Cloistered in my apartment in upper Manhattan, I would stare at the subway map for hours, studying every stop on every line. IN THE EARLY WEEKS of the pandemic, I became obsessed with maps of New York City. Photo: The Warburg Institute.Īffinities: On Art and Fascination. Aby Warburg, Picture Atlas Mnemosyne, Panel 39 (detail), 1928–29. ![]()
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