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A number of years ago, two talented students in my Photography Thesis class at the School of Visual Arts formed a couple and were invited after graduation to give a presentation of their work in the school's auditorium/theatre on West 23rd Street. They were way ahead of the curve, generating complex images and animations with the then novel GIF format hoping to break into advertising, fashion, and the now quaint term of “rock video.” While I liked them as “people”(?), I could not, attend their lecture and I am glad I did not, for later, in seeking out coverage of the event, they appeared on the podium with the words PRINT IS DEAD in big caps projected behind them in brutalist Orwellian grandeur. I made an strong association with this proclamation with a gun-toting William Burroughs blasting holes through newspapers pasted on wooden boards in his Kansas backyard as part of his late-career collage making, another war on the printed word.
When David Lichtenstein offered me the role of “Images Editor” at DIVISION/Review I immediately agreed, joking that I could not contribute to anything resembling the literary/poetry journals so prevalent in a certain type of bookstore in a certain kind of city or town with poems trickling down pages and earnest “fine art” photography of shadows, icicles, and winsome grad students. Now I regret this aside. Like the hand held album cover by your favorite folkie or porto-hippie band, these modest volumes are cultural touchstones that, in their own way, hold their own in the bygone flotsam and jetsam of print culture. The black and white images inside Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde double album were/are as compelling to me now as they were then. Color-free art publications that I was riveted to in the 70's included Avalanche (NYC 1970-6), Art & Project Bulliten (Netherlands 1968-89), Art & Language (UK 1969-?), and the 1980 Autonomia issue of Semiotext(e), which had every cool downtown person in NYC involved with it, and whose photography wa