Writing Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Katherine Oktober Matthews

Pain Isn’t Pretty

September 29, 2015
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

“If you sit with the discomfort long enough, it can transform with effort into something else. For example, ecstasy. For example, liberation. For me, what my body brews when percolating over these particular images long enough is transcendence of self.”
(GUP Magazine, 2015)

Picture or It Didn’t Happen

August 17, 2015
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

“As uncountable photos of bikinis and cocktails pass by my social networking streams in summer – trophy heads mounted on the wall celebrating the ‘best party ever’, souvenirs marking the sacrifices made at the altar of YOLO – I can’t help but wonder, is there anybody out there still buying into all this?”
(GUP Magazine, 2015)

The Decisive Moment

July 29, 2015
Reviews, Writing, Writing Highlights

"Above and beyond his many iconic photographs, [Henri Cartier-Bresson's] use of a simple phrase transcended into holy verse in the context of photography: the decisive moment."
(GUP Magazine, 2015)

Do Drones Dream of Simulated Celebrities?

June 2, 2015
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

"Perhaps an integral part of human vision is the power of, and inclination towards, deception."
(GUP Magazine, 2015)

Plot Points: How Reading and Writing Have Ruined Us All

May 20, 2014
Essays, Writing, Writing Highlights

“While it’s relatively straight-forward to identify relevance in a story, expert constellation-formers that we are, here’s the rub: life is chock-full of irrelevance and we all like to play narrator.”
(Versal Blog, 2014)

Selfie-Obsession

December 24, 2013
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

"What I find interesting is all the attention that various organized media are heaping towards selfies, repeating ad nauseam the fact that the Oxford dictionary named ‘selfie’ their word of the year. Who gives a shit?"
(GUP Magazine, 2013)

Horizon Destination

December 4, 2013
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

“This wanting, this hole in the soul of our being, is one of the great defining features of the human condition. And images capitalise on it, exacerbate it. They feed us with more desires before we even know we’ve consumed them.”
(GUP Magazine, 2013)

Pause Transition

November 24, 2012
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

"Pre-packaged with the camera’s ability to freeze life mid-sentence is also our implicit allowance to sacrifice the entirety of the experience to its souvenir."
(GUP Magazine, 2012)

Dream-Like

August 24, 2012
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

"'Dream-like' has become shorthand to describe a whole slew of artistic output... Yet, for all the work that’s described as 'dream-like,' I’ve had very few dreams that actually looked like those photos."
(GUP Magazine, 2012)

The Desire to Keep

June 13, 2012
Arts & Cultural Analysis, Writing, Writing Highlights

"Which is the greater loss: The loss of the photo I did not take, or the loss of the moment while wishing that I was taking a photo?"
(GUP Magazine, 2012)