Dear David,

Forgive me for replying tardily to your latest achievement of photojournalistic art.  I would have written sooner, except that a certain churl in Nassau Hall has expressed an unwonted desire for fresh English prose, and in order to oblige I am working harder than ever on salaries.

Ah, what I could say about this installment if I had world enough and time.  I might note the anxiety latent in (and I shall use the third person, according to the protocol of my profession) Dobkin’s prefatory note “there was a catamaran which looked like a prison boat and kept stalking us” – an anxiety which his joking tone cannot entirely efface.  Having in his previous trip to Yellowstone National Park made the great and stunning formal leap into sound – accomplishing the equivalent of the early cinematic leap into the “talkies” (hark: Garbo laughs and Old Faithful gushes) – Dobkin’s Antiguan journal seems to show the artist at rest and at ease with his greatness.  See, for example, the brilliant composition of

where the artist’s own body replicates the formal design of his beach-reading.

Just the same, despite the lightheartedness of his familiar themes and topoi – telephone booths, menu placards, self-portraits of feet – Dobkin here glances, lightly but indubitably, at that sense of insufficiency that haunts all human endeavor.  Is it foreshadowed by the photo of “this sad meal”?

In any case, here as never before Dobkin touches upon the limits of his art, or indeed of any art –as when he remarks “Unfortunately the situation of their purchase was too unusual for me to capture photos so this will be left to the imagination;” or, when the sublime throws him back upon himself, he explains that “Suzanne sat before a view that couldn't be captured.”  In a similar way, he explains that this picture

is a “mystery” that he himself cannot comprehend.  Who but the most accomplished genius would have the courage actually to call attention to the insufficient, to what cannot be said or accounted for, or to perform those imperfections that are somehow richer for their very failure: “(and my finger seems to have stuck on the button).”  I am tempted even to speculate that the caption to this picture

	

			
-- “This gentleman powed with Peter” -- is an of what Alexander Pope would have called “a grace beyond the reach of art,” where that apparent slip – powed – captures notions of posing, pow-wowing, and empowering all at once and thus deepens the work better than perfect command and correctness could have done.

But, as I said, I don’t have time to say any of this, and will merely content myself with thanking you (returning to the discursive mode of conversation) for sending me this link.

More to come soon, about your favorite subject: dogs.

Yrs,
Claudia