In my mail recently, two postcards in a set from McSweeney’s: juxtaposed images illustrating “convergences”, assembled by Lawrence Weschler. Velasquez’s Mars paired with a Joel Meyerowitz photo of a worker at Ground Zero, and Goya’s Saturn Devouring One of His Sons paired with a photo of George W. Bush appreciating a baby:
Weschler is a prolific author; among his books:
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders; Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative; True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney; Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees (conversations with Robert Irwin); (with Pico Iyer) A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces; A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers; Calamities of Exile; Vermeer in Bosnia: Selected Writings
The background of these pairings, from the McSweeney’s site:
To celebrate the release of Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, we’ve launched an extravagant contest: A Convergence of Convergences. Submit your own convergence—an unlikely, striking pair of images, along with a paragraph or three exploring the deeper resonances.
(The site has pairings from 2006 through 2011.)
On my blogs, I’ve posted other pairings. Earlier this year, a juxtaposition of two smiling women offering cakes, with this note:
Over on AZBlogX, I’ve just posted a set of seven “bookend” images of men: side-by-side related images. All of those are racy to some degree, but here’s one from my source for these things (Chris Ambidge) that is innocuous
Earlier on AZBlogX, two postings of porn stars, clothed paired with unclothed:
XXX 30 Porn-Star Portraits (link)
Jason & Jeremy, Jeremy & Jason (link)
And more recently, pairings of statuary with a live (and naked) man, here.
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