Anne Brigman, Nan Goldin, and Workshops
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 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.
Recently, Pros, Andrew C., and Andrew K. kindly supported this newsletter. Thank you so much! I just received a new shipment of teas from Japan. If you've ever found yourself wondering what that possibly might look like, well, here's a picture of my cup with some actual tea in it. Picture or it didn't happen, right?
It might surprise you to find a pictorialist picture in one of these emails. I'm guessing, though, that you don't know who took the picture, and you don't know the history of this particular artist. Or maybe you do -- in which case you know more than I did earlier today, before I read this great article about Anne Brigman:
She was an artist who helped shape American modernist, feminist, and landscape photographic traditions—and was one of the first women to photograph herself in the nude. She showed her first photographs in San Francisco, in 1902, and a year later was anointed by Alfred Stieglitz, who awarded her membership in his Photo-Secession movement. She published poetry and art criticism. Yet her work fell into obscurity after her death at the age of eighty-one in 1950.
If you know anything about the history of photography, the following won't surprise you:
In 1910, feeling artistically isolated in the Bay Area, Brigman travelled to New York City [...] For years, he had been planning and postponing a solo exhibition of Brigman’s work. [...] Once in New York, Brigman quickly became turned off by the harshness of the city and the atmosphere surrounding Stieglitz and his circle of male artists. Nearly all the photographs Stieglitz was exhibiting at his famous 291 Gallery at the time centered on the female nude. But, Brigman found, the men in Stieglitz’s scene often belittled the subject, ogling and making ribald jokes. This, she would later write to Stieglitz, “staggered her.” She left New York City and never returned; her solo exhibition never happened.
No real surprises there, but it's heartbreaking nevertheless.
Sean O'Hagan wrote a long article about Nan Goldin and the movie that Laura Poitras made about her. By this stage, you might think that you know everything there is to know about Goldin. And you're wrong. Go, read it! It's well worth your time.
I really like this quote by Goldin:
I think that people who make stories out of their lives tend to repeat the stories over and over again [...] But it’s not easy to access the real deep stuff, the real memories. As you get older, those memories keep coming back to you and they can take you by surprise because you don’t know when they will come back. And, unlike stories, you can’t tie them up in a tidy ending.
We keep talking about the great (male) road trippers with their 8x10 cameras and how starting in the 1980s they shaped how we see the United States. But Nan Goldin made a completely different picture of the country, one that's not about cameras and the mastery of the photographic craft. Even if as an outsider (someone born in West Germany) I have no emotional connection to the country at the time, it's Goldin's work that resonates with me on an emotional level -- which is why of late, I keep coming back to her work.
In my previous email, I told you about the band France and one of their albums, a 40 minute drone piece. Since then, I found another album, which is an even longer piece: 70 minutes. It's even better than the other album.
I'll spare you my thoughts on what excites me about this music. But I will point you to this article on drone music, which is a lot more interesting than you might imagine:
There was no electricity in the cathedrals of medieval Europe, like Notre Dame in Paris, where enormous pedal organs tuned to specific harmonically related pitches accompanied drone or sustained tone based vocal recitations written by composers such as Leonin and Perotin, or the Gregorian chant masters. Operated pneumatically, using a bellows, the organs were vast, and the cathedral functioned as a resonant chamber that amplified the organ so that the space was saturated with rich overtones, as strange psychedelic color effects created by the stained glass windows illuminated the walls and the faces of the crowd.
Oh, and if you want to know what it looks like when that band plays, here's a performance. While you're at it, you might also enjoy this really long version of The Velvet Underground's Sister Ray.
Lastly, I'm offering a couple of workshops in January 2023.
One is a bit conceptual (but not overly so). We'll be looking into the idea of boredom and what that means: what does it mean when we say a photograph (or a 70 minute drone piece) is boring? And why is it actually a bad idea to a) glibly dismiss art and b) underestimate what boredom actually gets at? We'll do a few readings, make some "boring" photographs, maybe listen to a short France excerpt, possibly talk a little bit about buddhist ideas of mindfulness, and look at a photobook in which almost nothing happens despite its 750 pictures.
The second workshop is very practical: it's all about writing for photographers, in particular writing one's statements etc. How do you write these things? What's good writing -- and what's bad? What writing tips can you use? At the end, you'll not only have a nicely written project statement, you'll also have your elevator statement, and writing any of these things will be much less of a problem in the future.
If this interests you, please be in touch, and reserve your spot. You can find all relevant details here.
With that I'm going to conclude for today. As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg