I could have figured that out myself
Welcome to the 84th 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.
When I started this newsletter I decided that I wasn't going to send out emails too frequently. But since my last email I have collected so many things to share that I can easily fill another email. So here goes:
I keep forgetting to advertise my own services here, in particular the mentoring I'm offering. There's a dedicated page that summarizes a lot of the details. It's all very flexible, though, based on what a photographer might need. So if you need someone who can help you develop a project or become a better photographer or make a book or whatever else... Be in touch! I'd be happy to work with you!
I seem to remember that a well-known German comedian (who became known through his Twitter feed) joked today that the main problem with AI images is that they look like something crypto bros would like. I was going to include a link to the original tweet here (it was in German), but it now appears to have been deleted. By the way, the link to Sebastian Hotz's Twitter profile might not work, given that since far-right troll and billionaire Elon Musk bought the site, it has been systematically dismantled.
I also seem to remember that I didn't want to spend more time with material on AI. But thankfully, there are more and more articles that dive into what it might really mean. And those are worth a read.
By applying computation on a massive scale, in an updated application of Fordist methods, to the creation of art, Silicon Valley completes this break with authenticity [that Walter Benjamin discussed]. There is, for these systems, no artist (besides those whose body of work form the foundational data sets); there are only images.
Mario Carpo makes an interesting art-historical argument:
The cultural adoption of all disruptive technical tools tends to prompt feedback loops between old and new ways of doing things; unusually in this instance, however, the inner logic of AI-driven image-making—far from heralding some future post-human development—appears to be actually reviving long-dormant visual strategies that dominated the arts, and art theories, of the past. [...] Imitation and style, which modernists had rejected from art theory, are coming back to art practice through the window of technology.
This past week, I continued work on what I hope will be a publication with the photographs I took in Hungary last month. but there will also be text included, and I'm working on that right now.
Long story short, someone in Hungary that I spoke to told me about a documentary that focuses on one particular memorial and its hotly contested history (the video has English subtitles). If you ask me, the story is absolutely insane. But you might as well watch it yourself. Note, though, that the video contains gruesome descriptions and images of violence.
As I wrote in my last email, over the course of the past year, I have been applying for artist grants. This has so far only resulted in a steady flurry of rejection emails (got another one just this past week).
That aside, though, in a number of applications I referred to a specific photographs as one of the starting points for a new project. It's very possible that you have seen the photograph by Stanley Forman. It shows a White man attacking a Black man with an American flag.
For the longest time, I thought that the picture must have been taken in the South some time in the 1960s. But no, it was actually photographed in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1976. If I had looked at the photograph carefully, I could have figured this out myself. In the background of the photo, you can see part of Old State House. Just behind it, there is a building with the address 1 State Street.
How do I know this? Well, that's the building I worked in when I first came to the US. Thus, I know the area where the photograph was taken very well. These days, there is a bank in the building on the left, and there is a record shop in the building on the right (which is where I spent many lunch breaks).
There's a very good article about Stanley Froman, Ted Landsmark, the man who was attacked on that particular day in 1976, and the photograph. Read it! It's so informative in so many ways.
Elizabeth Gilbert just decided that she was not going to have a novel released that's set in Russia. This sparked a lot of debate. I'll admit that I personally was unable to come to an opinion about it.
I think that's a perfectly valid position to be in, isn't it? I mean, we live in this world where we're supposed to have an opinion about everything, be for this and against that (or vice versa). I don't think that I need to play this game any longer. I am for and against many things. But I don't think that means that I have to have an opinion about everything.
But then I decided to read an article written by Francine Prose about the whole affair (if that's the word). I'm glad that I did.
And it all seems like part of the widespread and disturbingly successful campaigns waged largely on social media that aim to misdirect our grievances, to mislead and deceive us about whom we should be struggling against. Our enemy is not the middle school librarian recommending an LGBTQ novel, not the art teacher showing students an image of Michelangelo’s David. Why not redirect our rage at more harmful and powerful targets: at big pharma, the gun lobby, the military industrial complex, the petrochemical industry.
I found another recent article about Hito Steyerl and her work. I remember that when I first learned that the artist had grown up in Bavaria, I felt so bad for her. I had to live in Bavaria when I did my doctorate, and I hated every minute of it.
Born in Munich in 1966, to a physicist German father and a biochemist Japanese mother, she grew up in the “democratorship” of Bavaria under Franz Josef Strauss, the strongman state premier. “I was surrounded by elephants: the Nazi past of politicians, corruption, incredible police violence, repression against outsiders.”
Lastly, as I mentioned above, I'm very much into drinking Japanese tea. What I'm not into, though, is the whole stuff that has been constructed around it, in particular the so-called tea ceremony. The idea alone just rubs me the wrong way. I love drinking tea. But the idea of doing so as if one were a Japanese court noble... I don't think so.
Another aspect that rubs me the wrong way is how in the West, the tea ceremony -- alongside a few other Japanese activities -- is seen as one of those things that somehow make Japan special, if not particularly enlightened. If you think about it, this really is a form of Orientalism. Honestly, Japan really is just a normal country filled with normal people.
Until I read this completely fascinating article by Cammie Lee, I only had a vague idea of how constructed the notion of the tea ceremony actually is. To begin with, larger parts of what we now think of as Japanese was actually imported from abroad (China and Korea). And then in the early 20th Century, a number of Japanese authors set out to define parts of their culture in very specific ways in the West in what clearly was a nationalistic endeavour:
Chanoyu [the tea ceremony] is indebted to the unique economic and political circumstances of sixteenth-century Japan and offers a rich, dynamic way to understand Japanese history. But to suggest, as Urasenke does, that chanoyu captures the “quintessence of Japanese aesthetics and culture,” risks putting forth an essentialist narrative in line with the nationalistic propaganda of imperial Japan.
With that I'm going to conclude for today. My day is still only starting. Depending on where you are, yours might be ending.
Wherever you might be, thank you for signing up for these missives. I hope you'll enjoy them and...
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg