Tyler Cowen: recommendation

Transcript context

…Yes, I guess — it kind of depends. They do, as I was suggesting earlier, represent a diminished value to a photograph, but there’s something really great. I did a film on cancer and I ended up in a lot of hospitals talking to a lot of people, including some very young people who were sick. Sometimes the immortalization of that moment is to just the intimacy of a selfie and the two heads put together, in which the background is secondary or tertiary or not even important at all, but it’s just the witness of two people being together. That can be really important — and yet we also know the way in which it represents distraction and a lack of presence in the moment. It’s saying that the moment’s important, but in some ways it’s forgetting the moment. It’s like the people who take pictures of their food and then post it. Do they actually taste the food? [laughs] I mean, these are important things. Susan Sontag wrote an amazing essay called On Photography in which she understands the negative parts of it. You take a photograph: you’ve appropriated something from somebody. And Jerome Liebling, my teacher, would have said you are required to initiate a reciprocity as you take that photograph. That helps to make the exchange more equal and less — either narcissistic, in the case of selfies, or all this constant posing that we see people do. Teenagers, particularly as they’re ready to post on Instagram or TikTok or whatever it might be — all places I’m blissfully ignorant of. Social media is not social. If you’ve ever been in a room of adults (let’s not blame it on teenagers), adults or teenagers, and they’re all on their phones — they’re not relating, in a way. They’re tangentially relating. I’m interested, as [Henri] Cartier-Bresson said (the great French photographer), in the decisive moment. I’m happy to mention your book again, which I recommend highly: Our America: A Photographic History by Ken Burns. And last short question: What’s the next thing you’ll do? The next 17 things — but pick one. We’re finishing a film on the American buffalo: a great parable of de-extinction. We’re doing a history of the American Revolution. We’re doing a history of Reconstruction, but extending the borders of that. We have my daughter, one of my producing teams, and her husband in Florence for a year: We’re making our first non-American topic, on Leonardo da Vinci. We’re doing a history of LBJ and the Great Society. And we’re collecting interviews for a few other films that may or may not make it to a formal thing, but we’ll certainly hand off to the next generation if we don’t make it: to make films on Martin Luther King and other, I think, really, really interesting subjects. I know what I’m doing for the rest of the decade. That’s either a glory or a prison — or more than likely, Tyler, both. [laughs]…

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