Missing Link: Death of an Artist

May 2, 2023

I just realized that there's a link missing in my latest email. I quoted Heinrich Holtgreve but forgot to include the link to the piece. You can read the...

The Death of an Artist

May 2, 2023

Welcome to the 81st edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

Fish-skin images and more

April 19, 2023

Welcome to the 80th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

Ripping off the future

March 29, 2023

Welcome to the 79th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

Very convincing nonsense

March 16, 2023

Welcome to the 78th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

News from the bricks in the mud

March 13, 2023

Welcome to the 77th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

The quality of his defiance

February 27, 2023

Welcome to the 76th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

AI, oy!

February 16, 2023

Welcome to the 75th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

Painting by the numbers

January 30, 2023

Welcome to the 74th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

Sliding/Slipping into the New Year like...

January 21, 2023

Welcome to the 73rd edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

Happy New Year!

January 1, 2023

Welcome to the 72nd edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

The oddly coloured past

December 17, 2022

Welcome to the 71th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

The Mythology of the Algorithm

December 14, 2022

Welcome to the 70th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

A Life Well Lived (According to GPT)

December 10, 2022

Welcome to the 68th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

Anne Brigman, Nan Goldin, and Workshops

December 5, 2022

Welcome to the 67th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

Cats are the ideal form of life

November 23, 2022

Welcome to the 66th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

The problem with infinity snark

November 15, 2022

Welcome to the 65th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

How to get your work out

October 29, 2022

Welcome to the 61th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

Angry walking, trees, algorithmic kisses, and hyperart

October 19, 2022

Welcome to the 63rd edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

This is not a real picture

October 2, 2022

As you might know, I have long been looking into Germany's complicated recent past in order to better understand what it means to roam the world as someone...

It’s a privilege to see how we all behave

September 14, 2022

Welcome to the 61th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

Everyone has a story to be told

September 6, 2022

Welcome to the 60th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I'm hoping it will inspire you, too. If...

Pizza Flavoured Japanese English French Toast

August 29, 2022

Welcome to the 59th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I hope that it will inspire you, too. If...

Dead artists behind the camera (and more)

August 14, 2022

Welcome to the 58th edition of this newsletter! With each email I'm sharing material that has inspired me recently. I hope that it will inspire you, too. If...

Tools, tools, tools

August 3, 2022

This is a self-portrait by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, a Polish artist more commonly known as Witkacy. I first came across him when I saw a 1912...

sensations that fade (or: the white cube isn't life)

July 24, 2022

You usually don't know when you're seeing a person for the last time. When they're gone, you might ask yourself whether you could have done more, should have...

Yes! Workshops!

July 15, 2022

By now, you know that every once in a while (but not too often) I advertise what I do as part of this Mailing List. Today, I want to tell you that I'm...

The artist may not necessarily understand his own art

July 11, 2022

The other day, I remembered that I had started Luis Camnitzer's One Number Is Worth One Word a while ago. It's a very good book, especially if you're...

The Power of a Documentary

June 28, 2022

Various streaming services have been churning out documentaries about all kinds of things. For personal reasons, I don't watch much TV. I never got into the...

Yasumasete agetai

June 11, 2022

Early last month, I mentioned my idea to create something visual from the Japanese green tea I drink. In part, my motivation was conceptual (of sorts)....

Where Photography Ends

May 31, 2022

The other day, I started work on what I'm hoping to become my next book. I've had the idea in my head for a while, and I'm excited about getting started. In...

Twenty Years

May 22, 2022

I'm not particularly interested in anniversaries. I'm happy to celebrate other people's; but in my own life, I prefer to look forward -- rather than back....

Photo 101, MFA-student paralysis, and more

May 8, 2022

A few years ago, when I was still posting my own photographs on Instagram, I posted a series of pictures where I had placed the same object somewhere in my...

When your own trash is your treasure

April 29, 2022

I might be one of the few people who's genuinely not interested in the planet Mars. I get it, it's a large planet. But realistically speaking, there's not...

Odds and Ends and the Past

April 19, 2022

The other day, I realized that I needed to advertise the fact again that I'm mentoring photographers. I'm basically doing what I used to be doing when I...

Creativity And Its Unnecessary Discontent

March 27, 2022

Creativity is such a strange beast. For the most part, it appears to remain elusive, with what writers call "writer's block" being a lot more common than one...

Books, Books, Books

March 15, 2022

I'm happy to report that the ten sets of Risograph prints are sold out. I'm deeply thankful for all those people who decided to get a set (some even asked...

Prints for Ukraine

March 4, 2022

I’m selling 10 sets of high-quality Risograph prints from my book Vaterland to raise money for Ukraine. All proceeds will go to CARE’s Ukraine Crisis Fund....

We Are The Frog

February 28, 2022

It has been a while. I had promised myself that I would send out an email when I was ready to do so, regardless of how much (or little) time had passed since...

Against Didactic Fiction

February 2, 2022

This picture has nothing to do with what I wanted to talk about. But I thought that if I started with text, then maybe I'd already lose a bunch of readers?...

Sounds and Smells and More

January 18, 2022

You might have seen Sochi Singers by Rob Hornstra and Arnold van den Bruggen when it first came out. It's portraits of these Russian restaurant singers....

The Power of Words (and Art)

January 12, 2022

My last email generated a flurry of responses, and it was shared widely. As a consequence, this Mailing List's audience has grown quite a bit. If you've...

What It Takes

January 7, 2022

This is the time when photographers are getting their materials ready to apply for a spot in an MFA program. Having spoken with a large number of...

This Is The End (Of 2021)

December 23, 2021

It's the end of another year. Looking back, 2021 appears to have been mostly filled with disappointments for me: another year of the pandemic, no traveling...

Everything, All the Time, Everywhere (incl. Tendonitis)

December 11, 2021

Stuart Jeffries is the author of Grand Hotel Abyss, a book about the Frankfurt School that I started reading, yet never finished, in part because I had...

Eros + Massacre + Composition In Photography

December 2, 2021

A while ago, I signed up with a free streaming service. Free means: you don't have to pay money, but your programming is going to be interrupted by a period...

Kylo Ren Is The Vampire

November 22, 2021

Trying to learn Japanese entails watching the occasional movie (with subtitles). My Japanese isn't very good, but I can pick up basic conversations OK....

Heroes

November 11, 2021

Yesterday, I came across a cover of David Bowie's song Heroes, performed by Berlin-based Stereo Total. I'm not a Bowie fan, but I have been listening to...

Germanicisms and "Books For Snobs"

November 7, 2021

I don't recall how Alexander Wolff's Endpapers had made its way into my Reading List. But there it was, and since I needed to start a new book I thought it...

Mundane Halloween

November 1, 2021

During my childhood in Germany, Halloween wasn't an event. I'm not even sure I had heard about it (I can't remember). These days, things are different, as...