Reading in yesterday’s NYT that the Tate Modern is planning a $397 Million dollar expansion by (who else?) Herzog and de Meuron gave me a distinct sense of dejavu. Aren’t those the guys who…exactly? Click here to catch all the echoes yourself.

A couple of choice bits I could not pass pulling out of the article: Sound familiar? “The novelty in the Tate Modern annex is that it will turn the museum’s face away from the river and toward the borough of Southwark.” hmm. I wonder if it’s “face” will resemble a visage as much as the new walker does?

And check out this computer generated image of the new Modern interior. Hmm. Can you say townsquare?

ODD Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

On Tuesday evening Walker’s family programs manager, Ashley Duffalo, and I taught the first session of a 4-part history of photography class at the new downtown central library- titled “Framing the World: Photography As Art” the class will delve into the early developments in photography and lead up through contemporary work. The focus of the class is not on the technical aspects of photography, but rather on the idea of photography as an art form, and what makes one picture a work of art, while another might be considered only documentation.

The class came about in large part due to the current Walker exhibition Diane Arbus Revelations. In giving tours of a show like this, its possible to provide a good overview of one particular artist, but often not enough time to talk about the medium in general and how others have used it. This class will provide us with an opportunity to address larger issues, which hopefully will all come together during a guided tour of the show during the last session.

Photography can be a pretty sticky issue for people- we had some interesting discussions about the nature of images and how viewers thinks about and analyze them. In training Walker tour guides to give tours of the show, we talked about some ways to interpret images.

For example, some of the questions a viewer might ask include:

o What is the subject?

o Are there multiple subjects? If so, what is their relationship?

o Was the photograph posed/arranged, or candid?

o How is the subject framed? Is there space around the subject? Is it evenly spaced, what is the angle, distance?

o How do you think the photographer felt about the subject? How can you tell?

o What is the lighting like? Is it dark, bright, moody? What effect does the lighting have on your perception of the subject?

o How would describe the photograph? Blurry, sharp, dim, bright, shadowy, clear? What details seem to be emphasized?

o Can you tell when the photograph was taken? How? Do you think the time and place is important to your understanding of the image?

Obviously this doesn’t address everything, but its a start. I know in the coming sessions we will have some lively debates-we already heard from a few people with strong opinions about both Arbus’ work, as well as the work of contemporary photographers such as Jeff Wall.

As an aside, the Peoples’ University is a great program, run by the Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library, offering a wide variety of free courses for adults.

Last night’s meeting of The Artist’s Bookshelf brought us once again to unexpected places. After an all too brief but insightful guided tour of the current Arbus show (sprawling in scope and massive in exhibition), we hunkered down in the Art Lab, armed not with garlands of garlic and wooden stakes, but only with iced cappucinos, for a provocative examination of one of that artist’s favorite books: Dracula.

Nearly all in attendance agreed they’d enjoyed the read, though some were slowed by the period’s ornate literary stylings and incredible verbosity. Yet, we found it to be a surprisingly contemporary novel in terms of construction (the use of journals, letters and newspaper clippings) as well as its lurid obsessiveness with sexuality.

We discovered a number of thematic links between Dracula and Arbus, some of them obvious: both display an almost voyeuristic fascination with the grotesque, and some of them more obscure: both reveal hidden worlds while seemingly declaring “all is not what it seems.”

Finally, we came across a quote from the critic George Stade:

“In Dracula, for all its occasional clumsiness and systematic naivete, Stoker transformed what was merely personal or only of his own time into images of something more: of something at once monstrous, and definitively human…”

that might very well apply to the photographs of Ms. Arbus as well.