A book is a beginning, not an end
Before I get started — I got a bunch of goodies for you — a little bit of housekeeping.
First of all, after I sent my last email I received an unusually high number of replies, all of them supportive and many of them from people who find themselves in the same conundrum that I described. Thank you! I’m hoping that there will be some way of keeping this kind of conversation going.
Second, I’m offering a long-term workshop/course for photographers who want to solve some of the problems that might be plaguing them: How do you work through being stuck? How do you edit? How do you write and/or talk about your or someone else’s photographs? How do you read a photobook? And what good texts are out there about photography that are not the usual boring suspects (Sontag/Barthes) and offer a lot of insight?
In a nutshell, the course is something like a mini-MFA course, except that you won’t get an actual MFA. But you also don’t have to go into insane debt. So there’s that.
Check out the description of the course here. If this interests you, please be in touch. There’s a deadline: 13 November, by which you need to sign up. The deadline is mostly to allow me to plan for the first meet-up.
Even though the course is called 9×9 — it’s a maximum of 9 photographers, and it will be nine sessions every three weeks (with an additional introductory meeting), I will also run the course with 7 people. Or 8. But not less. For this to work, there needs to be a critical mass of participants, because in the end, it’s the participants that are encouraged to do most of the talking.
Sign up, it will be fun (and very productive)!
With that said, here is the material I collected over the past three weeks:
There’s an exhibition about Robert Frank and his work at MoMA. As you can imagine, this spawned some articles. Ariella Budick’s in the Financial Times hit a nerve with me, albeit in a strange fashion (if you can’t access that link, try this one).
I have to admit that I found it sad that while the critic was able to understand Frank’s decision to move away from The Americans (“He felt doomed to spend the rest of his life rehashing The Americans.”), in the end, it’s all the way back to the rather reductive “How does a genius get back to work after rejecting his own gifts?” (yikes!) and “The constraints of the 1950s served Frank well; freedom let him down.”
This following passage bothered me in particular: ““I was really destroying the picture,” he said. “I didn’t believe in beauty anymore.” Could a maker of beautiful pictures say anything sadder?”
I’m reading a book by a German writer right now that talks about authors losing full authority over their work. Budick’s paragraph would be a good example. After all, if you deal with art, then at least in theory you will have to allow artists to do what they need to be doing. That is where things get interesting, even if you don’t like it.
In the end, Robert Frank ended up getting exactly the kind of review he was trying to escape. Now that is sad.
If you have an iPhone, you know how bad Apple’s “Camera” app is. It hallucinates pictures that are always too vivid, too sharp. Often, the app outright creates information that doesn’t exist. That’s why I have been using Halide+ for years now.
You know me, I usually couldn’t care less about camera/gear talk. But there was no way I would get stuck with a phone that has a pretty good camera, only to have all of that marred by some incredibly shitty software.
Anyway, a recent New Yorker article made the exact same point. So if you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe Kyle Chayka.
You might be tired of me writing about how Japan is not the kind of Zen-IKEA country that it’s mostly portrayed at. Matt Alt has now published a book about clutter (he lives in Japan), and there’s a long section about Japan. I think even if you’re not as interested in Japan as I am, you will find this article fascinating. It dives deeply into Western ideas versus the reality and how both developed.
“Right now,” writes Savannah Dodd, “the [photo] industry is having a crisis of conscience, and the past few years have seen a surge in online debate about ethics, as concerns have been raised about photographic practices across a wide range of industries”. In the article, you’ll find a link to a podcast in which issues around the ethics of photography are popping up.
An interview with Hans Gremmen. The questions are maybe a wee bit simple, but Hans’ answers definitely are not. Especially not something like this (my emphasis):
Often people come to me saying: “I worked for years on this body of work and want to make a book to finalise the project”. That is a wrong view on what a book is. A book is a beginning, not an end. Also, the relation between photography and books is very unique. There is no such thing as “original” photography. Photography is always a reproduction. Whether it is a C-print on the wall or printed in a book, both are as original. This perspective means a book is a work of art, not a random container of work.
How not to write about Andy Warhol by Gary Indiana (RIP). Really insightful but then it gets to the review of Blake Gopnik’s book. I’m not going to give anything away. Read and enjoy!
“The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted.”
If you think that’s something you can get behind, then well, do it! Or maybe you always wanted to have something in common with Björn Ulvaeus. Either way, you can sign the statement right here.
“Photos from the day of a fatal boat accident off Hokkaido's Shiretoko Peninsula in April 2022 have been recovered from a digital camera belonging to one of the passengers after 2½ years.” A heartbreaking story from Japan: “Seeing the last scenery our son saw filled us with deep emotion. But thinking he would have wanted to share these memories in person only added to our sorrow and regret.”
“Does the camera make the unspeakable more speakable in the digital age? Is that a good thing or just a thing?” asks Fady Joudah.
And here is a long article about one of Palestine’s most well-known journalists, Wael al-Dahdouh, who managed to escape the carnage after he lost most of his immediate family.
Future history books will be absolutely brutal about the carnage inflicted in Gaza and about the willingness by so many people and governments to defend the indefensible.
With that, I will conclude for today. As always thank you so much for reading!
— Jörg