I almost wrote "brilliant read", but I caught myself.
Welcome to the 114th 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.
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This was a big week for me. I published my first article about something other than photography or art on CPhMag.com: I wrote about the book Rental Person Who Does Nothing. The plan is that it's definitely not going to be the last such piece.
I'm not going to give up on photo writing; at the same time, I simply can't imagine only writing about photography any longer. I simply have too many other interests; and to be perfectly honest, I'm currently not feeling very good about the general state of photo writing. It feels much too limited/limiting to me, possibly reflecting the medium itself.
Meanwhile, on my Patreon, I published a longer piece about portraiture. I had asked my patrons whether there was something they'd like to read about, and someone suggested portraiture. I'm really happy with the piece, even as it ended up being extremely critical of some portraiture (Avedon). If you're not a patron, there's a the option of a free seven-day trial membership.
I can't pretend that I'm an expert on comedy (remember, I'm German). But I came across an article written by Yuki Nivez, a female Japanese stand-up comic, that I found really interesting. In the piece, she talks about how she approaches doing comedy in a country like Japan:
Some things are so normalized in society that their oppressive natures are almost invisible. Women are often oversexualized and objectified just for existing, but when a woman expresses her sexuality on her own terms, or embraces her beauty, she’s shamed and “humbled.” In a misogynistic culture, a woman’s sexuality is often only accepted when exploited, and that’s how autonomy is robbed.
Many of my jokes purposely challenge this culture of double standards and slut shaming.
"I have a confession to make," writes Max Read, "I don’t really know what A.I. chatbots are for." Me neither. Read then dives deeply into some aspects of AI generation, including images. Apparently, "in the process of fighting one kind of bias, Google had turned the racism dial down too far and accidentally generated another, admittedly much funnier and weirder kind of bias." It's a brilliant piece.
(I almost wrote "brilliant read", but I caught myself.)
This article by Elizabeth Goodspeed has a nasty quote about AI folks: "What makes AI imagery so lousy isn’t the technology itself, but the cliché and superficial creative ambitions of those who use it." Three sentence in: what a mike drop!
Once you've made it past this point, there's some really good insight into taste: what is taste, and what does it mean to have it?
developing taste [...] [is] the product of devouring ideas, images and pieces of culture not because someone you respect likes them, but because you simply can’t look away. Developing taste is an exercise in vulnerability: it requires you to trust your instincts and preferences, even when they don’t align with current trends or the tastes of your peers.
That's really it, isn't it?
I have so many questions and concerns about this article that centers on Gerhard Richter's Birkenau paintings. Maybe I'll just note that these paintings look like all his other squeegee ones, so that's kind of weird. And that's ignoring the sources of these paintings, four well-known photographs that have been written about quite a bit, for example by Susie Linfield. How or why the article glosses (squeegees -- haha) over that escapes me.
Apparently, there's a new(ish) catalogue that contains the photographs used by W.G. Sebald in his books. This article discusses it and some of its content. To me, some of the discussion comes across as somewhat oblivious to what photographers or people working with photographs do. But maybe that's just me being too critical. I'm tempted to get a copy of the book; alas, it's kinda pricey.
Lastly, I don't know whether you follow Laurie Stone's Substack (ugh, I know, Substack). In her latest email, she writes about nude photographs and what they might mean, given how they offer a different way of looking at one's naked body. I think this might be some of the best photo writing I've seen in a while.
And that's it. For today. I hope you're doing well!
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg