Everyone has a story to be told
Welcome to the 60th 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, and I'll re-invest it into the Japanese green tea that fuels much of my creative work.
In my attempt to expose myself to spoken Japanese, I recently started watching shows available on Netflix. I watch each episode at least twice in order to help my brain become more acquainted with the language. If this sounds tediously boring, that's because it is. But if you don't like tedium or boredom, you'll never learn a new language.
After a really good show that ended up being incredibly grim and depressing, I now switched to Terrace House, a Japanese reality-television show. Knowing that it was reality TV, I had very, very low expectations. I couldn't really say, yet, whether that was the correct approach. But so far, this has been a really good choice for my language learning.
To begin with, the show is incredibly slow. At the beginning of the first episode, you see the six people who end up living together arrive at the house. And you get to see for each and every one of them how they open the door and lug their (heavy) suitcase up that little step that in many Japanese houses demarcates the area where you keep your shoes on and off. This sounds very boring, but it's somewhat interesting. The real benefit of the slow pace is that as a viewer, I'm not overwhelmed with enormous amounts of language. It would be impossible for me to imagine learning English from an American reality TV show: it would be way too fast, and my resulting English would be really terrible.
That said, I might be picking up some language used by younger people that someone my age wouldn't use. I already sent someone やばい！すごいね！(romanized: Yabai! Sugoi ne! Roughly: OMG! That's amazing!) -- only to be told that I wasn't going to use やばい (even though the person I conversed with admitted that she used it, too 🤷🏻♂️).
Another very fascinating aspect is how polite these young people are. It's brilliant because they do repeat of the useful phrases that you need to learn all the time. So far, so good.
In the first episode, after the arrival of the six, the starting credits unfold. I briefly thought that my Japanese must have made a lot of progress, given I was able to understand the lyrics -- until I realized that it was in English. Oh well. You can hear the music here. Warning: it's terrible music that's also really catchy (the worst combination).
But there is more to it. Having listened to the credits, I started wondering about the overall message. Could it possibly be that... I had to look this up. Here are the lyrics (the first two blocks):
Life can feel like a red light screaming "Go!"
And everyday [sic] means an answer I don't know.
This world can make you wanna fake it
And nobody wants to face it alone.
Its hard to shake that feeling that your hearts [sic] not home.I'm trying to live,
Trying to hope,
Trying to love,
Trying to cope,
Life's a war that few of us survive.
And I'm just trying to make it out alive.
I don't know whether the original Japanese show uses the same music. Ignoring that, those are some terrible lyrics, aren't they? Life's a war that few of us survive? What an incredibly grim message!
The people who commented on YouTube all seem to really like the music. It's true, it's catchy. But nobody seems to be bothered by the lyrics.
Thinking about it a little bit, I thought that if my book Photography's Neoliberal Realism had a theme tune, this would be it.
Somewhere in between photographs by Annie Leibovitz (with their celebration of the rich and powerful) and by Gregory Crewdson (with their depictions of capitalism's losers) you could imagine someone singing those words.
I didn't really know anything about Michelle Hart until I found this interview with her today. You might remember that in my last email I linked to another interview on The Creative Independent. I tend to always read their interviews because there is so much goodness being shared. Often, it's artists I am not familiar with. What makes these interviews particularly interesting is that once you strip away the differences between, say, fiction writing and photography, you end up with really sage advice that applies equally in both fields.
In Michelle Hart's interview, the advice focuses mostly on writing. But I do think there are some nuggets in there for photographers. You'll just have to be flexible and swap out some phrases and ideas. For example:
I was writing on the notes app on my phone at Port Authority. I was writing in Gmail drafts. I was writing in public, but writing about things that I would be really embarrassed if anyone read.
Beyond the fact that I do the same thing (I always thought I was a weirdo for creating part of my writing this way), this is an idea I've tried students to embrace. However, I haven't had much success, yet. Whenever I ask them why they don't use their smartphone to produce photographic sketches, there's no answer. It's as if only the "real" camera can make the real work. And I get that idea. You probably don't want to just mess around with any camera (then again: why not?). But sketches are good. Most artists work with sketches -- except, as far as I can tell, photographers who don't sketch out their work. It's very strange.
There's this idea in photoland that the investment of making a photo has to pay off in terms of a good picture. To which I would respond: no, it doesn't! Don't limit your creativity.
You have to believe in the story that you’re writing.
This is the hardest lesson for photographers. Especially these days, it's so difficult to ignore what a possible audience might think. But you need to do the thing that you believe in! Or as Michelle Hart phrases it:
You always hear that you have to write the book that you’d want to read. For a long time I thought that was kind of bullshit, like something people say because they know that no one else would want to read their book, but it’s actually true. It’s about finding the thing that excites you and knowing and believing that’s going to excite someone else, too.
Perfect!
You know what? I'm just going to throw in a recent picture I took because why not.
And that's it for today. If you can, go out into the world and make a picture. Or simply go out into the world. I know that I will.
Thank you for reading!
-- Jörg