Böcker av George Porcari

One Second to Live: Photography, Film and the Corporeal in An Age of Extremes is a book, in 16 chapters, that covers the aspect of photography and film that deals with the "substantial" and the "non-spiritual" - the two dictionary definitions of the corporeal. Corporeal images - moving or still - explore our common terrestrial existence in a particular place (as opposed to space) and a specific time ( as opposed to non-temporal imaginary realms peculiar to science fiction of fantasy). Whatever the vast difference in corporeal photographs and films they all deal in some way with our innate, and complex relationship to all living things and to our own sensibility. Such a view accepts as a starting point that stories are lived in bodies and made in them. As a result corporeal works are usually grounded in an intensive appreciation of sense experience. Lastly, in corporeal works there is usually a sense of doubt about any arrangement that might organize this experience into a system or a philosophy - doubt is often ever-present, not as angst but as play - or just to complicate matters as some fusion of the two. Whatever the subject or themes, corporeal poetics are invariably also celebrations of the density of being. The corporeal artwork's most salient philosophical quality is usually some form of melancholy skepticism and stoicism balanced out by a variety of Epicurean gratifications. While these are expressed more often in ironic asides, jokes, reveries, satires or aphorisms, than in formal writings or artworks, the latter are the subject of this book where we will address the corporeal aspects of still and moving images.The 16 essays that make up the book primarily cover the 20th century starting with the auspicious meeting between Edward Weston and Tina Modotti in 1919, and on to Gerhard Richters "painting as photography" in the early 21st century. It is my hope that this book entertains, clarifies, and puts the work of these master photographers and filmmakers into some historical and cultural perspective.

A catalog that coincides with an exhibition of photo collage work by George Porcari in 2016 at Haphazard Gallery in Los Angeles titled Greetings From LA: 24 Frames and 50 Years. The work of collage used photographs by Porcari of Los Angeles from 1963 to 2013.

The Antonioni Adventure covers the work of Michelangelo Antonioni from L'Avventura to The Passenger. Antonioni, like other radical filmmakers of the immediate post-war period, most conspicuously Jean-Luc Godard and Pier Paolo Pasolini, observed society from what we might call an outraged critical perspective that sought to explore the resulting tragic contradictions of communities from inside the society that created them, and thereby establish a new aesthetic paradigm through a critical analysis that was fundamentally poetic. What was understood by these artists - as common ground - was that the post-war utopian promises of universal access - via the computer, electronic communication and media, along with greater high speed mobility - all presumably facilitated a new utopia, but one that by the late sixties was in deep crisis.The Antonioni Adventure traces the Italian director's trajectory through the 1960s as he responded to that crisis in social mores, political/cultural wars, and a new emotional terrain. At the time all of this seemed very much like dangerous, uncertain, and uncharted waters. Longer essays on Blow-Up, Zabriskie Point and The Passenger detail the importance of those films as they explore the new contemporary social and emotional matrix. Antonioni's work fearlessly charted sensitive characters coping under the new postwar realities; conditions that are very much still with us today. What are those circumstances, and how did the characters in those works react to them - how and why did they succeed or fail? While many filmmakers would explore the complex dynamics of relationships in the thorny postwar era, such as Ingmar Bergman, only in Antonioni's work do we see characters attempt to create emotional bonds in a peculiarly hyper-realistic modern context that is fundamentally antithetical to those emotions. The result is a sense of pathos and humor that is profoundly sympathetic to his characters without being sentimental or patronizing. His profound sense of irony and disgust was reserved for those in power, as we see in Zabriskie Point, not those who were searching for how to cope in a difficult new world made in large part by technocrats and their machines. The futility of human endeavors and the permeability and fragility of the flesh were constant themes that found new ways of expression as his work progressed from its neorealist beginnings toward unexplored areas that were new to him and to his audience. The book traces the trajectory of that "adventure" - or that search - for a new means of expression within the context of the feature film.