William Faulkner’s
Nobel Prize SpeechStockholm, December 10, 1950
William Faulkner officially earned the Nobel Prize in Literature for the year 1949, but he did not receive it until the following year, because the Nobel Prize committee could not reach a consensus in 1949. Hence, two Nobel prizes were awarded in 1950, for the prior year and for the present one. The speech Faulkner delivered was not immediately intelligible to his listeners, both because of Faulkner’s southern dialect and because the microphone was too distant from his mouth, but when it was printed in newspapers the following day, it was immediately hailed as one of the most significant addresses ever delivered at a Nobel ceremony.
The text below is reprinted from Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters, which differs from the speech he actually delivered at the cermony. To hear a studio recording of Faulkner reading the (revised) speech, please visit this page. Also worth visiting is this page on the 1949 literature award from the Nobel Foundation, which features an audio recording of his live presentation of the speech, which unfortunately ends before the conclusion of the speech.. (This is apparently the same audio used for the first video featured below.)
Nobel Prize Videos
These videos were posted to YouTube. The first has only the still photo of Faulkner accepting the award, but it does include nearly three minutes of audio of Faulkner delivering the speech at the ceremony. The second video is a documentary featuring scenes from the ceremony, but not the speech itself. (It also happens to be in Swedish.) Click here for more information about the documentary (and another link to the video.)
I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work — a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
May 1, 2009
William Faulkner [Stockholm, December 10, 1950]
April 30, 2009
LARA STONE SMOKING with ZOMBIE [DOLCE & GABBANA: Steven Klein - 'Fiction Noir']
Italian designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana once again tapped Steven Klein to shoot their spring-summer 2009 campaign.
Portraiture in the past has been regarded as a documentation of a person but for me it is a documentation of the encounter between myself and the subject. It is not meant to reveal them, nor is it meant to subject them to an X-ray; it is a departure from that. I am more interested in the alchemical reaction that occurs when elements are brought together in a space.Not so much a collaboration between photographer and subject, more a scientific experiment - the studio becomes a lab. For me the portrait is not psychological either. It is atomic. Atoms change their electrical charge continuously, and the more challenging the shoot, the greater the chance of this charge. Yes, I do begin with an idea, a series of ideas that link together logically. But logic is often superseded by events beyond my control.Art starts as a means of control but the atoms that compose us can spin in a different direction. When you see Madonna in a series of these images, she is neither a perfected icon nor is she revealed – instead she remains ambiguous. I feel the obsession with celebrities is for the most part based on a tired need to know oneself through the other, and perhaps the concept of knowing oneself is all deluded.There is a desire to link photography with painting. My background is painting and I feel there is no connection between the two. It is as if the camera is linked to a sin, producing a bastard art form that we feel we must link to the past in order to give it credentials. I don't want those credentials. I have no need to apologize for photography. My archives exist only for sound business reasons; otherwise my work would be disposable. And there lies the contradiction, for I am a private person not an exhibitionist, I am a person who lives for the future, not the past; I am standing behind a camera in order that I can extend myself in front of it.
Alex Chilton + Yo La Tengo: Femme Fatale [Maxwell's 12/7/07] what is that, samba?
Performed live at Maxwell's in Hoboken, NJ, on the 4th night of Hanukkah, 12/7/07
April 29, 2009
William Eggleston: Foundation Cartier pour l'art contemporain [4 April - 21 June, 2009 Paris]
William Eggleston
Foundation Cartier pour l'art contemporain
[4 April - 21 June, 2009 Paris]
William Eggleston, born in 1939 in Memphis, is one of the most important contemporary American photographers. From the 1970s onwards, his work has significantly contributed to the recognition of color photography as an artistic medium. Eggleston has published his work extensively, and it has been shown in many major exhibitions around the world. He continues to live and work in Memphis, and travels considerably for photographic projects.
City homage ... Untitled, Paris series, 2006-2008
At the Cartier Foundation, you enter William Eggleston's new exhibition by descending the stairs into a big red room lit by hanging lampshades and furnished with a large leather sofa, two matching armchairs and a baby grand piano. It is a quintessentially Parisian homage to Eggleston's most famous - and strangest - photograph, Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973, otherwise known as "The Red Ceiling".
Last Wednesday evening, as the last of his photographs and drawings were being hung, Eggleston arrived at the gallery for a walkabout. Thin and dapper in a dark suit and polished Oxfords, he made straight for the baby grand and, oblivious to the flurry of activity around him and, indeed, the photographs in the adjacent gallery, sat down and started playing. For a good five minutes or so, he was utterly absorbed in the music he was making, his long, manicured fingers picking out a series of fitful, often fractured, classical extemporisations. When he finally arose, and placed an unlit cigarette in his mouth, he seemed momentarily startled by the burst of applause from those present, bowing and smiling mischievously like a surprised child.
Eggleston, as his images often attest, is a one-off, an American aristocrat from the Deep South with a wild streak and a singular ability to capture in his colour photographs all the often overlooked beauty, strangeness and intensity of the commonplace. His groundbreaking work from the early 70s, collected in books such as William Eggleston's Guide and The Democratic Forest, confused people at first with its capturing of what might be called the heightened mundane, but he is now regarded as the maverick genius who made colour photography the serious art form it is today. Eggleston is, among other things, a supreme colourist. The saturated intensity of those early photographs has given way to a more muted approach of late, but he retains an unerring ability to render the everyday surprising and sometimes surreal.
As he approaches his 70th birthday, Eggleston has finally turned his "democratic" gaze on Paris, perhaps the city that has been most iconised through photography. Three years ago, the Fondation Cartier commissioned him to photograph the city, which he has been doing ever since on regular extended trips from his native Memphis. "I'm taking over where Atget left off," he tells me, laughing. Eggleston's Paris, though, is perhaps as far away from Atget's Paris - or Cartier-Bresson's Paris or Brassaï's Paris - as one could imagine. It is, in fact, closer to Eggleston's Memphis, in so far as it emerges as a place that is both oddly recognisable and utterly alien. "I approached it and am still approaching it as if it is just anywhere," he says in the exhibition guide. "You're not quite sure: is this Paris, Mexico City, elsewhere?"
With Eggleston, though, it is nearly always elsewhere. And yet, Paris - or Parisness - leaks into these images in the most mundane ways. His image of the Bastille is taken from what looks like a wall mural of the same. Silhouetted, it looks like a mosque, the unreal sky around it covered in a graffiti scrawl. His photograph of the famous brasserie la Rotonde shows it empty and gutted, surrounded by metal shutters, awaiting a makeover. In another image that plays with the visual iconography of the city, he frames a stack of chrome chairs outside a cafe, their purple fabric matching the even more lurid tones of a film poster for Batman, le défi
Eggleston's Paris is a messy, often makeshift place - who else would be drawn to the milky water in a cement mixer? - which could indeed be any early 21st-century city. Graffiti is a recurring motif - on walls, vehicles, windows, billboards. He is drawn, too, to the garish - the hyper-bright colours of a children's funfair ride, the unreal pinks and yellows of neon shop signs. The quotidian sublime is glimpsed too, though, in the mossy green haze of street light reflected on a wet pavement or the familiar blue sky, clear and clean, that appears above buildings and treetops throughout his work. Not for the first time I was left wondering whether Eggleston possesses some innate ability to tap into that soft, opaque, unreal otherworld that the rest of us glimpse only in moments of intoxication or chemical realignment. Is he always elsewhere?
One or two of these new images contain echoes of earlier photographs, his own and other peoples. A row of teddy bears in a Parisian shop window recalls the row of dolls on a car bonnet that he shot in Memphis in the early 70s. (It was used on the album cover of Like Flies on Sherbert by Alex Chilton, another Memphis maverick.) A polythene bag packed with used paper cups recalls Robert Frank's photograph of a polythene bag packed with dolls' heads. Eggleston's eye for the heightened mundane may have mellowed of late - there is nothing here as ominous as "The Red Ceiling" or as deathly as, say, his portrait of a pale young woman lying prone on the grass, holding a camera - but he still goes his own way when it comes to composition. He famously only ever photographs a subject once, and his "shotgun" approach whereby a subject is targeted, then shot, accounts for the odd angles and seemingly off-kilter point of view. The shot of a young girl's outstretched leg is pure Eggleston. It is a portrait of sorts - her red shoe, the comic resting on her knee, the sense of childhood reverie caught, too, in that outstretched leg - even though he has done nothing as obvious as training the camera on her face.
At the Fondation Cartier you can also see a series of Eggleston's drawings, busy, colourful abstracts that nod to Kandinsky. They are what they are: involved, often intricate, doodles in pen that seem like spontaneous explorations of colour. Some of them have been placed alongside photographs and sometimes the juxtaposition works. More intriguingly, though, many of the photographs themselves tend towards the abstract in their arrangement of shapes and colours. That suggests that Eggleston, as he enters old age, may have found yet another way of seeing the everyday anew.
For the last three years, American photographer William Eggleston has photographed the city of Paris as part of a commission for the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.Taken throughout different seasons, these new images by one of the fathers of color photography portray the local and the cosmopolitan, the glamorous and the gritty, the everyday and the extraordinary.This exhibition also provides an exceptional occasion to bring together William Eggleston’s distinctive pictures and his recent paintings, an unknown aspect of his work that has never before been presented to the public.William Eggleston, Paris
A book created specially by William Eggleston on the occasion of the exhibition, which presents his photographs next to his drawings, published for the first time.Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
Paris
Steidl, Göttingen
Hardback, 22 x 28 cm, 184 pages,
70 color photographs,
50 drawings
Steidl, Göttingen
An exceptional limited edition of 100 books in a box set,
numbered and signed by the artist
