ECSTASY… NOW MORE THAN EVER

Amid the pain of pandemic, we hope this issue of BLACK SCAT REVIEW provides some welcome relief while sheltering in place.

In Plato’s Dialogue Phaedrus, ecstasy is characterized as divine madness or divine possession, and is considered to be a gift to humanity from the gods. However, we may choose to channel our erotic energies into sexual pleasure or the cultivation and worship of erotic beauty. A transcendent state expressed in poetry, a text, or images. This issue is devoted to the fleeting power of ecstasy in its myriad forms, subtle, unequivocal, or unabashedly palpable.

Contributors include: Peter Ruric, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Eurydice, Catherine D’Avis, Galya Kerns, Doug Skinner, Tom Whalen, Bob McNeil, Nicole Scherer, Tom Bussmann, Paul Rosheim, William Minor, Norman Conquest, Adam Matson, Dynamic Wang, Alexandr Ivanov, Jim McMenamin, Rhys Hughes, Amy Kurman, and Emiliano Vittoriosi.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

Desires that Disappear

And words got souls just as much as we do. Words change when you say them, the way your soul changes when the right woman touches you. Same with photographs. They got souls. You look into a photograph too long, too hard, and you steal the very soul of the photograph…

Doug Rice, from Here Lies Memory

cover final

These remarkable photographic moments – memories – faces from  the street – dig below the surface of flesh and go to the bone where forgotten words are etched. Words like lost souls in joyless eyes.   AN EROTICS OF SEEING goes far beyond today’s omnipotent street images, the snapshots and candid portraits that reveal only surfaces. Doug Rice captures epiphanies in the faces of strangers— finds an “erotic” connection  only a visionary artist can discover. It is not simply a matter of capturing the “decisive moment” — it is the depth his eye perceives —piercing crowded  public spaces and  revealing absences  – ghosts and their memories – the very soul of our transient lives.

AN EROTICS OF SEEING:
The force of photography as philosophy’s broken sentence
Photographs and text by Doug Rice
5.25″ x 8.25″, perfect-bound paper. 64 pp.,
$20  /  Edition limited to 300 copies
ART PHOTOGRAPHY

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

“Doug Rice reveals things about loss, memory, language, invention – things that we didn’t know needed to be said or seen, but learn it in the miraculous accident Rice realizes as writing and photography, and offers it as an inexplicable generosity that resonates with the generosity that Rice intuits in the world he re-inhabits.”
-EARL JACKSON, author of Strategies of Deviance