Upstate
by Xhenet Aliu | Photos by Tema Stauffer - The focus of Tema Stauffer’s photographs of Hudson and its neighboring places—Livingston, Germantown, Kinderhook, areas unincorporated or merely unidentified acres along State Route 9—isn’t grandeur. She’s not there to document what’s easy to see. There are pretty things, but they’re not things that have been designated by committee as such. They’re things you drive past, or people you walk away from. Stauffer lingers. That’s significant. It makes me think of a lecture I heard in the summer of 2017 by the author Charles Baxter, which he called “Things About to Disappear”: “In an age of anarcho-capitalism, one of the most subversive of all activities is to remember how things were, and how they felt, and what people did. Such remembering is not nostalgia. This is what it means to be alive at a particular time with a functioning memory.” I would add that it’s not simply remembering what seems significant that’s a radical act; it’s paying attention to what you’ve been trained to ignore.