| Tuesday, November 4, 2008 6:08AM | | | | In the Marketplace of Ideas (4) | Posted By: Eric Kraft
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The Making of It, Part Four
Inevitably, there came the interview with BW, during which Kraft showed him the layouts for the book.
BW: This book marks the point at which the text dominates the images.
Kraft: That may be.
BW: The images have been reduced to illustrations of the text.
Kraft: I don’t agree.
BW: I know that there is nothing I can do to get you to slash some words from this, so I will ask a favor of you when you go to work on my images of New York.
Kraft: Yes?
BW: Restrain yourself. Ask yourself whether the images might not say what you want them to say without your saying it again in words. Let them stand on their own. Don’t smother them.
Kraft: I—
BW: Yes?
Kraft: I’ll try, but there will be text.
With this book, Kraft realized that he really would have to settle on a single controlling metaphor for the unseen woman to use in describing how the unseen man should proceed. Should that metaphor be derived from sailing, rowing, walking, flying, rowing in the air, or ballooning? He wasn’t yet sure.
Whatever the choice, the advice that the unseen woman had offered in Just Now, at Present, that the unseen man ought to “chip away” at the obligations that were tethering him to the past, preventing him from proceeding or progressing, seemed likely to be “wrong” by the time Kraft reached the sixth and final book, wrong in the sense that it would not fit the metaphor, because the metaphor was going to be about making progress toward a goal or destination, not about carving a future out of marble; that is, the obligations to the past could not be represented as the portion of marble that must be chipped away from a block to reveal the sculpture hidden, or waiting, within.
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