Can I Interest You In A Yellow Swimsuit?
Welcome to the 98th 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.
There's a phishing scam making the rounds on Instagram. From what I gather online it has been around for years (I'm not even going to comment on Facebook being able to disable it pretty easily). At some stage, you'll receive a DM that tells you something about a "copyright infringement" you were supposed to have committed. There are no actual details. There is a link to some outside site where you're supposed to enter some details so that "Meta" can sort it out.
Obviously, the link doesn't go to "Meta". I think for many people the term "copyright infringement" is strong enough for them to overlook the fact that it's easy to tell that the link leads to a phishing site. Regardless, once you do as they tell you, they'll take over your account and then contact you and offer you to give it back if you pay money. This week, a photographer said as much in an email from her Mailing List.
As far as I can tell, it doesn't end there, though. Apparently, the compromised account is used to DM other people. That's how/why these DMs don't land in your "Requested" folder. Obviously, names etc. are changed so that you don't become suspicious right away.
So if you're on Instagram, be careful! Always check the links and details of such messages. The scammers might be from non-English speaking countries so check language (note the strange upper cases in the picture above).
Furthermore, if you have not done so set up two-factor authentication -- not just on Instagram. If you don't know what that is, that's the first thing you should look into right now (before you even continue reading this email).
I posted a warning on Instagram about the scam. I also compiled a few thoughts about social media in general that I thought I'd replicate here (with more details).
Regardless of how you feel about social media, it's very important to keep one thing in mind: with any of the sites, you're not in control of what you're able to do.
In the most extreme case, you could lose your account for reasons that have nothing to do with you (whether through a scam, because some far-right billionaire buys the site and destroys it, or whatever else).
A much less extreme but possibly equally harmful change has to do with the algorithms that run underneath the hood. You might find that your "engagement" suddenly is way down: you have thousands of "followers" but for reason only a very small fraction now sees what you produce.
The list of possible problems is much too long to give here. And what I want to talk about isn't about social media anyway. Instead, I want to talk about control.
I don't think of myself as a control freak, at least not in the broadest sense. When I'm an artist, though, I am very, very insistent on control. As you know, I'm experimenting a lot with all kinds of things, so I'm open to that. But I want to have control over the final output.
I'd argue that that's the most important aspect of being an artist. You know and control what you create -- or rather what you end up showing to people. And you have to, because to a large extent what you create reflects back on you. It tells people: this was made by this very specific person who has these very specific concerns and ideas.
How or why you would give up that degree of control once the work has been made is beyond me. Obviously, when you make a book or work with a gallery, you have to be able to compromise. That's not what I'm talking about. My advice there would be: don't be a difficult person when working with other people.
What I'm specifically interested in here has to do with technology: social media and the various ways you showcase what you do. You want to do that in such a fashion that you retain control over what you do -- to the extent that this is possible.
If you only rely on social media, it's very, very hard to have a lot of control. I already described this above. In the worst case, what you build up might simply be lost in a heartbeat (just ask the people who were active on Tumblr or MySpace for more examples).
In some ways, control is an ugly word. Well, it is for me. It reminds me too much of being German and of the inflexibility that is so common in Germany.
So let's use a different word: voice. Another way of talking about the problem with social media is that it's very difficult to establish your own voice, given that you have to squeeze everything into the container that is handed to you. That container might change its shape, or it might open differently at some stage. (Lousy metaphor, I know, but you might get the point.)
Consequently, as an artist, you want to develop at least one way of expressing your voice that gives you full control. Obviously, if you're already a famous artist and the same curators or galleries or publishers give you endless exposure regardless of what you do, you don't have to worry about this. But the vast rest of us do.
That's where a Mailing List comes in. I strongly believe that a Mailing List is the idea tool for an artist. Here's why:
It's a very basic tool. It only relies on emails. Emails basically haven't changed ever since they were invented.
There are many reliable providers that you can use when you need a Mailing List. I would always use only those that provide the most basic service. By that I mean that I would stay away from Substack. They are trying very hard to be a publisher. As a publisher, they have very different concerns than companies that focus on Mailing Lists.
You can control your own Mailing List in the most complete fashion I can imagine. It is possible that you might have to change the company you work with (for whatever reason), but it's super simple to take your subscriber base with you.
Contrary to what many photographers appear to believe, your emails don't have to read like the one that ironically arrived in my inbox while I was writing this email. You don't have to tell people about the shows you curated and the magazines that showed your work. Of course, you can. I personally delete such emails right away, but there might be people who enjoy this stuff.
Whatever you want to do, I'd ask you to think about your voice: how can you use your Mailing List to tell people about your work in such a fashion that they'll be happy to receive another email from you? That's what it comes down to.
You could approach this challenge like a business person and think about your core competencies. Or you could simply think about what you want people to know about yourself and your work.
The one thing you need to keep in mind is that building this voice up is something that happens incrementally, one email at a time. In between, you might produce something you don't like. Well, then you don't have to repeat it, right? So don't agonize over things too much. Also, don't procrastinate.
A Mailing List gives you a very, very simple tool that you can use to build up your voice and create an outlet for your work that you can control. In fact, it's such an easy tool that I am flabbergasted that it's not used more widely. And again, I exclude those soulless PR emails -- there are too many of those already.
Set yourself a schedule! Work out how often you want to send an email and stick to that schedule. It could be an email every other Monday or maybe roughly every two or four weeks... Anything that's not too frequent or too sparse will work.
Of course, you can advertise your Mailing List on social media. So there's a neat tie in. But if a crazy billionaire buys a site you used and destroys it, your Mailing List is still there.
The best part is that people will recommend your Mailing List to other people if they like it. Recommendations already existed before social media, and they function in the real world as well. If you're particularly lucky, people who teach might recommend your Mailing List to their students.
If you don't have a Mailing List, think about creating one. Think about it as a mix of two aspects: the things you want to do and the things you have to do. If, like me, you're an introvert and advertising your work makes you very uncomfortable, focus on the work itself. Talking about it in a Mailing List is advertising it. But if you focus on how much the work means to you, then you won't even notice that you're also advertising it.
So find the way this works for you. Like I said, it's a great tool that with time will make you at least partly independent from what you're able to do on social media.
One final point: Ideally, you build up your Mailing List before you need to announce important work (a new project, a new book, whatever else). That way, you already have an audience.
Oh, one more point (sorry, I've been watching too many episodes of Columbo): don't focus on the number of subscribers. Focus on what you write about. What you really want to do is to create something that you're happy with. A lot of subscribers for sure is nice (I guess?). But it's a lot nicer to get nice email responses from people. I feel that this point gets especially lost on social media, where people obsess over "follower" counts.
If you have questions about starting a Mailing List, simply be in touch. I'm happy to offer advice or help out with anything.
Meanwhile, the other day I was trying to use Google for an experiment I had done before. In particular, I was looking for a particular photograph, in this case one of the beach portraits by Rineke Dijkstra. I found one of the pictures and then used it as the source image for an Image Source. But Google has changed the way this works. Now, you get something like the above. Looks fine, except...
You don't have to scroll down very far at all to end up being flooded with ads. In this case, instead of instances of this particular photograph, it's all sites that sell swimsuits similar to the one in the picture I was looking for.
Like I said above: companies will change their tools all the time. Certain things you're able to do now might simply disappear later.
Speaking of Google, the other day an article made the rounds that had the headline "First Google Search Result for Tiananmen Square “Tank Man” Is AI Generated Selfie". Really? Would this be true? I did my own Google search and found that it was not the case. On social media, there were more people who also did not get the same search result.
Keep that in mind when relying on search engines: what they show you might depend on who you are (in this case possibly whether you're logged into Google Workspace or maybe your search history or whatever else).
Speaking of advertising, this article by Amy Fisher amused me. I don't know anything about nail polish. What I do know is that the colours have crazy names (much like paint you buy for home use). I've always wondered how those names come about. Amy Fisher tells you:
We typically have a theme or general story that we want to tell with the shades, so we’ll do a small brainstorm with our copywriter. We’ll take that theme and then bounce ideas off of each other. It might take three to five days before we’re ready to come back to the table with some ideas. But it doesn’t really take that long to come up with a name, honestly. Sometimes it’s a brainstorm meeting. Sometimes it’s an email chain. It really depends.
Last week, The Guardian published a really interesting article about ruzzian oligarch Roman Abramovich and his extensive art collection. The story is about as gross as you can imagine (and then some).
Speaking of which, There’s No Such Thing as an Ethical Museum Cara Marsh Sheffler writes. I found the article while doing a little research online while writing The Neoliberal Photo Museum Is Not Your Friend.
I already recommended a couple of Time Sensitive podcast episodes here. By now, I listened to more. There was only one, though, that I can heartily recommend, the one with Alfredo Jaar. I think that if you listen to it (you can also read the whole thing online when you follow the link) you'll see why it resonated so much with me.
Lastly, Bellingcat looked into how well tools are doing that are supposed to detect AI generated images. Read all about it here.
And that's it for today. Thank you for following along. If you're new to the List: welcome! Feel free to respond and comment (or suggest things).
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg