Ever wondered what the rest of this email looks like?
Welcome to the 83rd 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. The 2023 shinchas have just come out -- that's the first teas harvested, and they're usually a real treat.
The following might not surprise you: I'm a huge overthinker. If I could pay my bills with money miraculously generated from overthinking... But no, overthinking won't do that. Instead, it'll have you go over each and every detail of each and every thing going on in your life.
As much as I enjoyed my first trip abroad in years, the change from my daily activities to three weeks of hyperactivity -- teaching and giving talks and photographing -- might just have been a tad too much. I so desperately wanted to make the trip worth my (and my students') while, given that I currently have nothing else planned. That probably wasn't a good idea. It was like burning the candle from all possible sides. Part of that burning included writing a grant application (somehow, I had come across the grant while being there).
For a long time, I didn't apply for grants or other funding opportunities because of the odds and the ways these systems work (I don't have enough friends in the right positions if you know what I mean). But obviously if you don't apply for anything, you won't get anything. It seems obvious that larger parts of my photographic work won't happen without some grant support, so for a while now, I've been writing applications.
Getting the financial support to, say, continue my photography in Germany or Japan might be nice, of course. But there actually is a benefit to applying for grants. It ties in with the benefit of writing about your photography, something that a lot of photographers don't want to do (because, you see, they're photographers, not writers [epic eye roll]).
Typically, grant applications have very strict requirements for what they want to see. A lot of that is completely random, so you need to be able to ignore that aspect. But unlike in a project statement, say, where most people actually don't seem to care all that much whether what they write makes sense and/or impresses a reader, in a grant application such an approach would be completely insane.
If you look at it that way, a grant application is a perfect opportunity for you to express what you want to do concisely and in a fashion that's easy to understand.
See that way, the worst application requirements -- "outline your project in 300 words" -- are actually the best: there's no way that I can outline my project in only 300 words... Well, there is not? Maybe your own overthinking and your own buying into your own bullshit (the latter is a big problem in photoland where this is rarely, if ever, being called out) makes things so complicated that you only think you can't spell things out in 300 words (the 300 words are just some random requirement I made up, they're not based on anything specific). If you just sit down and force yourself to obey the limit, this might actually get very interesting.
In my case, such requirements have made me outline a project I've been pitching two times now, in both cases following word limits that I thought were way too tight. But they weren't. I simply had to cut out all the unnecessary stuff and focus on the essential bits. That's a really good exercise.
For that reason alone, I now can actually recommend applying for grants. You're obviously not going to get them (unless you're lucky or have the right friends). But the process of writing the application will greatly help you get clarity about what you actually want to do.
Try it! (I only apply for grants that don't have an "application fee", which honestly is maybe the most dishonest and disgusting scam in the art world: charging people money who need money.)
I'm German so I have no sense of humour. None. Nothing there, sorry. This might explain why I found the above so funny. This is from a little while ago, when some techies used some new AI tool to generate what might be "around" famous paintings.
What's funny to me, though, isn't so much the added material. That's just sad. The funny thing -- still makes me laugh -- is the phrase "the rest of the Mona Lisa" and the idea that someone would go to the Louvre, say, stand in front of that painting and think "I wonder what the rest of the Mona Lisa looks like".
Of course, the fact that those tech types produce these pictures isn't very funny. It merely shows a complete lack of imagination, which easily explains why so much material around the idea of art generated by AI is so bad. AI doesn't arise out of a vacuum: it's made by people who have no imagination whatsoever -- apart from what little they need for their programming jobs.
It is that aspect that as a society we will pay a heavy price for.
Unfortunately, that's not funny at all.
Given the same hucksters that brought us NFTs are now active in the world of AI, I actually regret that the world of NFTs imploded. At least there, those people were only engaged in some Ponzi scheme which didn't have the potential to fuck up the rest of the world.
For a while now, I have been enjoying Laurie Stone's mailing list. She's an incredible writer who has had me engrossed in a number of things where I would have never thought that I might even be remotely interested.
That's the sign of a good writer: they make you interested in something that you thought you had no interest in.
About a month ago, Stone wrote about Édouard Levé, a French photographer and writer, whose Autoportrait blew my mind when I first read it. The email did, too:
Narrative without plot! Where have you been all my life? We leave places, but does anyone arrive? We bond and betray, bond and betray again. We find things that have been lost. Then we lose something else. Most plots are teleological, implying—like the creation of the world by God and social Darwinism—that the end of a story is imminent in its origin and according to a guiding plan. If the narrative voice, itself, becomes a bread crumb trail, not much has to happen for the reader to follow it.
On the flight to Budapest, I read Yayoi Kusama's autobiography, which had already been published in 2002. To be honest, I ended up being a bit underwhelmed. So I gave the book away once I had arrived.
About a week after I arrived back home, I found an article by Dexter Thomas with the somewhat irritating title "What the Art World Doesn’t Want You to Know About Yayoi Kusama". I know that writers often (typically?) don't write their headlines. I'm not a big fan of click-baity headlines, and I almost didn't read the piece. I'm glad that I did anyway.
Writing about the book I had just read, Thomas notes
In her original Japanese edition, Kusama refers to the area in New York where she used to live transforming into a “slum,” with real estate prices “falling by $5 a day.” She attributes this to “black people shooting each other out front, and homeless people sleeping there.”
Wait, what? I know I was pretty tired on those flights. But for sure I would remember this bit. Why did I not remember it? Thomas:
When the English translation of Infinity Net came out in 2011, this sentence was missing. It was not a mistranslation. The rest of the paragraph was intact; only the sentence about Black and unhoused people was deleted.
Read the full article to get an idea of what's going on here.
I don't know whether you remember the photobook Stakeout Diary that has now been published in three different versions. The original version produced by Éditions Xavier Barral resulted in the biggest splash in photoland. The next version, published in Japan, is a lot better (it uses the original negatives and offers more background; this is the version I own). And then there is a third version, also made in Japan (pictured above).
You might or might not have heard about the book. Either way, you absolutely want to read this in-depth article about the story depicted in the book. It's a long read, but it's worth every minute of it. You learn about the photographer, Japan in the late 1950s, and you learn about the people in the pictures. It's an incredibly well researched article.
With all that said, I'm going to conclude for now. I hope you had a lovely weekend so far and are going to enjoy whatever rest might still lie ahead for you.
Thank you for reading!
-- Jörg