a few crocodile tears for their colleagues
I was going to include this article in my previous email. Then I realized that I hadn’t fully read it, yet. But now I have. It focuses on what you can do with language when there are things you can’t say, for example when you need to avoid certain words or terms because of censorship on a platform like TikTok.
Avoidance speech offers an excellent example of the productive nature of taboo. When it becomes advisable to avoid a given set of vocabulary items, language expands rather than shrinks. For an English speaker unfamiliar with avoidance speech, the practice might initially sound confusing or intricate—yet these complex systems of taboo, avoidance, and euphemism are in some ways linguistic universals.
I might officially be over survey books on photobooks now. I suppose I would need to write an article about my misgivings to explain things properly. Briefly, though, they are:
by their own nature, these books don’t do the photobooks much justice by showcasing them as if they were stamps
the books only encourage rich collectors to buy them all up, and thus they create scarcity for ordinary people who might simply want to see a photobook
all-too-often, the books offer little to no historical or other context outside of photography, meaning unless you know, say, the history of Japan really well, you have no idea how to understand certain books
Still, there’s a new book about factory/company photobooks. I figured that given that I would not be interested in buying any of the books featured therein and given that the book looked well designed, I might as well locate a cheap copy and buy it. Which I did.
I think at some stage, I will write something about it for my Patreon. I don’t think the book is essential for anyone other than hardcore photobook people, and even many of those might not need it.
Regardless, here is an interview with Bart Sorgedrager, the man behind the book. There are many illustrations that give you a good idea of what the book looks like.
Writing about war is difficult enough. But how do you write about a war waged against your own country? This review of The Language of War by Oleksandr Mykhed dives into what this might entail.
Käthe Kollwitz appears to have a moment again. Here’s Hal Foster writing about a recent exhibition. Well worth your time.
David Christensen kindly sent me this long essay by Brandon Taylor (thank you!). It centers on Alice Munro and recent revelations around her. If you haven’t heard, read the text.
If you have read Claire Dederer’s Art Monsters, the article might be of interest for you. Truth be told, I thought that Taylor’s essay probably could have benefited from some editing because it takes what feels like forever to get to what I consider its most important point:
There isn’t “the art and the artist” and one does not “separate art from artist.” To my mind, that is a broken moral calculus that confuses rectitude for an honest accounting of how we live in the world. The very question is stupid right down to its core. The better question is why do you need to feel comfortable in the rightness of the art you engage. Why do you need to create a safe art that has no harmful valences in it? I know why. You know why. Because otherwise, one has to own up to the knife you hold behind you, ready to plunge it into your brother’s back. Otherwise, you have to own up to the commonness and smallness and the very humanness of monstrosity itself.
I do think that maybe, maybe that’s not quite it, though. As much as I understand the misgivings about what he calls a broken calculus, I don’t think calling it “stupid” is overly helpful.
Furthermore, the idea that if you were to ignore art made by bad people, you’d then stuck with “safe art” is curious. I could point you to a ton of art that’s not safe at all but that’s not made by art monsters.
I guess the question isn’t so much whether there should be harmful valences but where exactly you’d want them.
After all, if something separates art and its maker, it’s this: there’s a huge difference between a bad actor if that bad actor is a character in a novel, say, or the writer her or himself. One, the former, is fictional. The other, the latter, is not.
I don’t think that you only get to face the “commonness and smallness and the very humanness of monstrosity itself” if you do not make some moral choices about whose work you decide to engage with.
I might change my mind later.
What I like, though, is that there are more and more of these discussions popping up, meaning that at some stage, we will hopefully be able to have such discussion on the scale we need to have it.
The other day, I saw some quotes by Hayao Miyazaki, the founder of Studio Ghibli (I’m not into anime, so I haven’t seen any of those movies). One of the quotes struck me as completely un-Japanese in its sheer frankness. Someone commented that it had to do with AI. I looked into it.
I found this article, which basically is a summary of what you can see in the video. It’s probably best if you simply watch the video. Once you’ve seen the full context, it’s simple to understand why Miyazaki would refer to something saying “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
Whatever you might make of this, seeing the interaction in the video reminded me of the fact that as someone making art (let’s pretend that that’s what they were trying to do with the work in question), you will never be able to control how someone will respond to it. In all likelihood, someone will bring something completely unexpected to the table and react strongly. And as an artist, you will have to navigate that fact the best you can.
Charlotte Jansen wrote a really interesting review of an exhibition centered on so-called conflict photography. It gave me some hope that maybe we’re finally be able to see an overdue much more critical engagement with something that has stopped doing what it pretends to be doing a while ago.
The Sainsbury Centre is probably the UK’s most radical museum. An enormous effort has been made in the last three years to display its collection as living entities, to ask existential questions through art. The Camera Never Lies, although earnest, doesn’t chime with that vision. It misses the chance to pose vital questions about how images are consumed, how history is reduced by viral images, how the role of photographers and picture editors influences our understanding of the world. This exhibiton [sic!] feels more like a reassertion of faith in a style of photojournalism that is – as the exhibition itself proves – no longer a viable or appropriate response. Yes, the grisly side of humanity is laid sickeningly bare. But where does that leave the camera?
“My family were all Nazis,” writes Martin Pollack, “my grandfather and grandmother. My mother and my father. My stepfather, my uncle – literally all of them were hardcore Nazis during the second world war. And after? Not a single one changed their convictions or voiced any regrets for the Nazi crimes.”
Oof! What a read! Make sure to read all of it, because you certainly don’t want to miss the ending.
"From today you are no longer my wife,” Aleksandre Roinashvili told his young wife, “and I am no longer your husband". Say what? “After his unhappy marriage ended, Roinashvili never again attempted to build a family, instead the photographer devoted his energies to documenting the cultures and landscapes of the Caucasus, and his beloved homeland of Georgia.” There are incredible photographs in the article about his life work, and so many of them. Don’t miss a single one!
The longest — and maybe best — read last: John Ganz’s essay about going back to Germany to locate the bookshop his family owned before they had to escape the Nazis. (There’s a brief appearance of a certain Erich Sander, son of August, the famed German photographer.)
The Jews had helped to build up Cologne, to make it a modern city, to spread Enlightenment, to industrialize it. Then, the tide changed, and the Jews were swept away. Their old friends in the bourgeoisie might have shed a few crocodile tears for their colleagues, and certainly for all those wonderful musicians and writers, but they were perhaps not so unhappy to see them go. The Jews were deported on the same rail lines they so eagerly helped to build, into the maw of industrial liquidation. Enlightenment really wasn’t needed anymore once you had the machines. There was no longer any purpose to these little Jews with their sentimental claptrap about art and culture, an art and culture that was never really theirs to begin with.
And that concludes this email. So much to read, so little time… One thing I’ve been doing these past few weeks is making time to read, especially in the evenings. It seems that for a while, I forgot how much I enjoy doing it.
I’ve also been working on my next photobook, which is supposed to be out by the time Paris Photo happens in November this year. It’s a lot of work, but I’ll tell you about that some other time.
Meanwhile, stay safe and well, and thank you for reading!
— Jörg