Yesterday, I drove up to Turners Falls to attempt to take some photographs there. Up until now, my photography has mostly not worked when it’s summer. It’s not the heat (even though walking around in high heat certainly is not fun); I simply do not know how to work with the light a bright, sunny day has to offer.

Obviously, I could spend my days staying at home and thinking about how to take pictures. When teaching, I ran into this rather popular approach many photographers use: instead of simply making work, they told me they needed to think about how to make it. Thing is, though, unless you’re a philosopher, problems aren’t being solved by thinking about them.

But I needed some more incentives. One was Turners Falls itself. It’s an old mill town at the Connecticut River. Much like the much more well known Holyoke (which is where Mitch Epstein photographed his Family Business), Turners Falls has fallen on hard times. But there are signs of some sort of comeback, even if parts of that involve the kind of gentrification that with time has the potential to do what it always does.

Turners Falls is weird, though. Gentrification has so far been restricted to two or three blocks north of Avenue A (Avenue A runs from the southwest to the northeast so I’m simplifying directions a bit). There is one hipster coffee shop, and there are some places selling art supplies and other expensive items. The other side of the same road has so far been spared, though. I don’t think I have seen gentrification on one side of a street before.

Regardless, there also is a pretty great bookshop — Unnameable Books. While I love going to bookshops, many local ones have too much of a Western Massachusetts vibe to them. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it’s just not my thing. When I looked up Unnameable Books online I found out why it felt so much like a bookshop you’d find in New York City: the first shop with that name was opened in Brooklyn. And then at some stage, the owner moved back up here (or so) and opened one here.

Anyway, I thought that as a reward for driving up to Turners Falls I could at the very least check out the bookshop, even if my quest to find new pictures would produce nothing. As it turned out, I did make at least one good picture (I’m not done processing what I have); and forcing myself to take pictures had me engage with the light (instead of just thinking about it).

At Unnameable Books, I then looked through the new releases. On one of the tables, I came across a book with the — for me — enchanting title Hell of Solitude. The author: Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. I know that this author has been very influential in Japan (one of the main national literature prizes is named after him), but I had never read anything by him. As it turned out, I had read the foreword by Polly Barton a while ago. That foreword, alas, had not piqued my interest. But given that the book was right there, I thought I might as well look at it.

Flipping through the pages by sheer chance I came across a selection of vignettes entitled Art and Other Matters. In it, Akutagawa writes about his own approach to writing, or rather about what he considered to be of the essence to produce something great. The first sentence I read immediately struck me:

Artistic perfection does not mean that a work is flawless.

I had to buy the book just for those vignettes. And I have not read anything else from the book, yet. But I have been re-reading Art and Other Matters.

“The passion of an artist who does not strive for perfection in his craft is meaningless,” Akutagawa writes. This come before “Artistic perfection does not mean that a work is flawless.” So you can see that with “perfection” the writer does not actually talk about something that is perfect in the kind of sense that one naively might assume.

While Akutagawa focuses on writing, the vignettes are broad enough for them to easily apply to photography (in addition, he uses examples from painting).

For example, “the content of a work of literature is not only plot, character, and the like, but all of these fused inextricably with form.” Remove the literature references, and you arrive at why in the world of photography, discussions around form and content often are so flawed: they’re not as separate as many people want to assume. As Akutagawa notes, content and form are fused. Form can be part of the content, and content often is partly expressed through form.

Hell of Solitude is a collection of poems (haiku), short fiction, and pieces such as Art and Other Matters. So if you buy a copy, you’ll not only get some incredibly wisdom about art making, you also get some of the work of an incredibly influential Japanese writer. And I think you kind of know of Akutagawa: he wrote the short story that Akira Kurosawa turned into Rashōmon (even as the movie adopts the plot from a story of a different title).

Speaking of gentrification, Josh Kline’s New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art is a long read that is incredibly rewarding. As the title implies, the piece is very US (well, NY) centric. But I think that even if you live elsewhere you will find at least some of the same trends playing out locally.

Brian Phillips compiled enshittification into a list of 40 items. We all know these, and it’s nice to see to what extent this kind of stuff is genuinely bothersome to everybody. For example, “When I click the “remember this device” box, maybe, I don’t know, try to remember the device?” or “Please, please stop asking me to verify my humanity by clicking on tiny motorcycles.”

Meanwhile, in Japan, we are told, “the growing practice of dressing up and photographing plush toys, has gone from a niche hobby into a full-blown trend in Japan.” Japan being Japan, this not only is a huge business (“the plush toy and nuikatsu-related market has reached around ¥45 billion (USD $282 million)”), it has also triggered discussions around — you guessed it — etiquette.

I don’t know about you, but I would actually prefer to live in a country where people have heated discussions around whether or not it is cool to bring and photograph plush toys to restaurants instead of ***gestures around in a mix of dismay and exhaustion***.

The incomparable Duane Michals died a little while ago. Looking around online for a specific piece of text I found this interview with him instead. It’s great — in part because Michals had no patience for stuff he absolutely did not agree with: “My great thing was, I never went to photography school. I’d have to unlearn everything.”

You might know about Ana Mendieta. Knowing about her means knowing about her death. How or why that can be a problem is explored in this long, incredible article. I don’t know whether there is a solution for the conundrum at hand: can you talk about a great artist without talking about her death (a likely murder)? Or maybe: how can you do that?

Here is an obituary you want to read (instead of, you know…): Judith Dooris’.

Why would you read an obituary for someone you have never even heard of? Two reasons: it’s really well written, and it talks about a great person.

Live your life so that someone might write that kind of obituary for you (and not, you know…)!

Speaking of obituaries, when I was trying to find a new job a few years ago, the one job I really regretted not getting (in fact I didn’t even get an interview) was writing obituaries for a major US newspaper. I would have loved that job: how can you write something smart about some of the worst people in the world? It would have been an incredible challenge.

I haven’t eaten, yet, and given that it’s already early in the afternoon, I’m getting really hungry. I better wrap this up before I get hangry.

As always thank you for reading!

— Jörg