Cats are the ideal form of life
Welcome to the 66th 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.
I've never read anything by Japanese author Shiraishi Kazufumi other than this interview. Before writing this email, I looked. Three books of his are available in English translation. Two of those sound very interesting. But I already have too many books to read in my house, so I made a mental note to maybe get them later.
The other day, I came across the interview I mentioned above, and I was completely mesmerized. As much as I love cats, I wouldn't have been able to imagine that I would enjoy reading a whole interview about a person's life with cats. Maybe as a writer, Kazufumi is able to engage with the topic more deeply.
In fact, I'm thinking that I'd really love to read interviews with accomplished artists about a topic that is not centered on their own art. It's not that I mind reading interviews with artists about what they do. But you know what I mean. Often, those interviews are too polished or too grandiose or too pretend-self-effacing or simply too rehearsed (there's nothing worse than reading an interview with someone where you know they've answered those same questions for many years already).
It is one of those strange coincidences that right before I started writing this email, I came across a 1991 interview with Nan Goldin. It's really good, because Goldin proves to be such a uniquely intelligent person when she talks about photography. You can tell (and not just because she's literally saying this) that she grew into photography as something that was incredibly important to her -- as opposed to, say, her male peers who "only discussed their cameras and equipment" and who created what she calls the "rocking tree school" (which, let's face it, is still around).
Here's Goldin's take on Diane Arbus (my emphasis):
I think that Arbus’s work is all about herself. Her genius is about not wanting to be herself, about wanting instead to be each person that she photographed. At the time she was photographing them [drag queens -- JMC], she was really trying their skin on. It’s the work of someone with empathy that borders on psychosis. But I felt with the drag queens she was seeking to reveal them and that wasn’t my desire.
That seems to get to the core of all of Arbus' work, doesn't it?
The very ending of the interview is particularly poignant:
I’d always believed that if I photographed anything or anyone enough I would never lose them. With the death of seven or eight of my closest friends and dozens and dozens of my acquaintances, I realize that there is so much the photograph doesn’t preserve. It doesn’t replace the person and it doesn’t really stave off mortality like I thought it did. It doesn’t preserve a life.
Through Alan Huck's Instagram I was made aware of France's Do Den Haag Church. France here is the name of a band. That's not necessarily an ideal choice, given that if you want to find information online you have to be very specific with your search terms.
Regardless, the band uses drums, a bass, and an amplified hurdy-gurdy. The album consists of a single track that for the LP is broken up into two pieces. The track is about as minimal as it gets: there's no melody whatsoever. Instead, there's a steady rhythm and an endless drone. It's easily one of the most fascinating audio experiences I've had in a while.
In many ways, this music is the complete opposite of what photography does. Instead of picking one very short moment out of the endless continuum of time and fixing it, the music presents a segment of and in that continuum, without there being an emphasis on anything special. You could imagine that the song could last forever, approaching the qualities of Warhol's movies.
I've been listening to the music while being on my daily walks, and the experience has been nothing less than mesmerizing. It is an excellent example of what music can achieve through sheer repetition and the inclusion of tiny variations. I don't think you could listen to this on the side (I know it would drive me nuts). But allowing yourself to fall into it widens your ideas of what sounds and repetitions can do: after a while, any craving for a variation completely falls away.
A somewhat regular reminder that if you're looking for someone to work with on your photography, I'm offering online mentoring. You can find all relevant details here.
The mentoring is completely tailored to a photographer's needs and goals, and it's based on the experience I gained teaching at an MFA level for a decade. I work with all levels of photographers, and the work can cover any stage of the process, whether starting out with a project, developing one, making a book or whatever else.
If you're interested make sure to be in touch!
Lastly, Edward Ongweso Jr wrote an article about the end of social media. For a while, things have looked pretty bad for social media. But now that a far-right billionaire bought Twitter and re-instated a number of antisemitic, racist, and/or anti-democratic accounts, larger parts of the media have caught on, in part -- that's my theory -- because so many journalists rely on the platform (if they had relied on Instagram we would have heard about that site's decline a lot more). Ongweso makes a number of very good points why we should care about this and what we can possibly do.
You might have heard of Mastodon, which essentially works like a Twitter that tries to avoid that website's problems (here's a good background reader). In a nutshell, Mastodon itself is a piece of open-source software that you can run to create a server (you could compare it to Wordpress, which allows you to run websites or blogs). As a user, you can sign on to any server you like (so you don't have to run your own, even though you could). They're all interconnected. So you can see other people's material even if they're on different servers. This might sound complicated, it's anything but. If you're curious, this has got you covered.
I've been using Mastodon since the end of October (when I deleted the content of my Twitter account), and it has been a most welcome change. So far, it has been completely free of everything that made Twitter so toxic.
And with that I'm going to conclude for today. I hope you're doing well, and as always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg