A History of Darkness
Welcome to the 89th 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 you want to support my work, you can sign up for my Patreon. This will get you access to exclusive material every week.
If Patreon is not your thing but you enjoy what I'm doing, feel free to send me a little something via Paypal. I'll use the funds to pay for the fee the service provider of this Mailing List charges me every month. If there's money left, I'll invest it into the Japanese green tea that fuels much of my creative work.
If you have recently sent a little something my way (or have done so in the past): thank you! Unfortunately, Paypal will not include an email address in their notification emails. But I usually am able to find the email address to send a personal thank-you note.
There is something a little bit creepy about aspects of mailing lists, blogs, and websites in general. If you want to, you can track who looked or how many people looked at what you had to offer. I've never wanted to for a number of reasons. To begin with, it feels invasive to me to look at who looked at my materials. Furthermore, as a writer I want to remain independent from "likes" or "open rates".
But I'm now finding out that this approach is creating a huge problem for me. For the past three weeks, I've been looking and applying for (non-photo) jobs. "Metrics" are a big thing. I don't have any metrics.
So wish me luck that even without them I will be able to find something.
I found this today. As you can see, it's from the context of Twitter, the social network that was bought and is now being destroyed by the world's richest far-right troll.
What's expressed here also applies to Instagram. Whatever you want to say about the alternative sites/apps we have already seen, it's quite possible that none of them succeeded simply because it's such a huge effort to re-build one's community, especially if everybody has to start from scratch. Toughening it out in the network you hate (whether Twitter or IG) ends up being the best option.
In light of what I've seen and experienced so far, I'm thinking that the next thing (assuming there will be one) will be a site/app that is radically different than Twitter or IG and that offers a lot more -- whatever that "more" might be. That's how social media essentially destroyed the vibrant world of blogging.
Anyway, after my last email that was filled with photographs of death and mayhem, here is an assortment of material that I compiled over the past two or three weeks.
Let me start by recommending this book. I read it a while (maybe two or three years) ago. Recently, I came across this wonderful article about the author, Hervé Guibert.
Why is this slim volume not accorded the same attention as the book to which it directly responds, Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida (La Chambre claire, 1980)? A simple answer can be found in Barthes’s towering stature relative to the much younger and less institutional Guibert.
It's a good question.
In lieu of teachable concepts like Camera Lucida’s studium and punctum, he spins tales of a queer life lived with and through photographs. Corporeality prevails. He treats the photograph as an unfailingly physical thing: handled, torn, creased, purchased, hidden, put on display, printed small, blown up large, retouched. There are photos so damp they stick to the glass of a train window; there is a photo stolen and pressed under an armpit, only to later decay such that the face it depicts appears ‘syphilitic’, ‘cancerous’. Guibert’s own body is ever present.
It really is a marvelous book. And honestly, it offers a lot more insight than Barthes', and is a lot less boring.
I compile the links for my newsletters by emailing myself, creating a longish threads of responses to myself. One of these emails only contained these words:
Can we stop calling what a camera has recorded as banal?
You've seen these articles, haven't you? (Almost every one about, say, Wolfgang Tilmanns.) So can we stop doing that now?
I hadn't heard about NPC streaming until it briefly caused a wave a couple of weeks ago (which became memefied briefly). It's too absurd to explain so you might as well read about it. Hayley DeRoche:
“I have mad respect for people who are doing this for more than two hours a day – because it does take a lot of effort. You are using your brain a lot more than people think you are when you’re doing that type of thing, because you do have to remember what each thing means and respond to it in the exact same way every time. That said, it was honestly fun.”
You will want to watch the video, too. I know, it's very weird. With the text added around it, it's still full of insight.
So many things wrong with this: some Italian street artist paints a mural in destroyed and occupied Mariupol, using an Australian photographer's photo without her permission.
How can this email not contain something about the two movies that everybody is talking about? You know what I mean. Well, to begin with, I'm not a big movie person. And I have my thoughts about these movies, in particular about Oppenheimer.
I read some articles about the movies and most of them were not very interesting. But Ryu Spaeth wrote something interesting: Who Are the Japanese in Oppenheimer?:
the tragedy is that his genius was literally weaponized against a country that may no longer have posed a threat to him or his country, against people who have been forgotten by their opponents, if they were ever known at all.
Even more interesting is Anne Helen Petersen's piece, which contains gems such as
patriarchy begets patriarchal art. Men’s self-regard (and concern) is the narrative gravity; the idea that other audiences would also be interested in such a narrative goes unquestioned.
or
Barbie as film, Barbie as posture, Barbie as movie-going experience — it’s such a challenge to the masculinist vision of the world. Not a utopian one, not one free of the chains of consumerism or other forms of intersecting privilege, but a rejection of the de facto centering of the white male experience, both as subject matter and as audience member.
There was one truly remarkable interview I read. Unfortunately, it's only in German, but you can probably run it through some machine translation. In it, Annika Lindgren, granddaughter of the Swedish author, talks about her thinking about whether and how to change the books in order to remove language that today is considered problematic or outright racist.
You might have seen discussions about this, which as far as I can tell mostly defend older literature, arguing that it must not be changed. I never fully understood that approach, especially not when it's about children's books. If I had children (I don't) I wouldn't let them read books that contain racist text or ideas.
Regardless of how you feel about this, the interview smartly addresses a number of the issues at hand. Thankfully, it stays away from the culture-war territory that these discussions too often end up in.
A very interesting piece by Michael Rothberg about “People with a Nazi Background”: Race, Memory, and Responsibility:
By indicating the inequalities of wealth and status that define Germany’s multicultural present, Hilal and Varatharajah have uncovered the lacunae that inhabit confrontations with the Nazi past.
In light of the far-right AfD now polling at 20% -- Germany is currently lurching very forcefully to the right, this particular topic is sure to re-appear again and again, in particular since the AfD and larger parts of the "conservatives" would rather forget about the country's Nazi past.
And lastly a picture of a Post-it note I found in a book of writing about photography. I didn't keep the book, but I kept the note.
On that note (pardon the pun!) I will conclude for today.
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg