I want the blood to be unspilled
Welcome to the 100th 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.
Why, I asked myself this morning, should I dwell on the fact that this is the 100th email from my Mailing List? What I should be doing instead, I realized, is something entirely different, namely to thank you for spending time with what I write and for occasionally sending a kind note or a little money so I can maintain my green-tea addiction.
Thank you!
These days, everybody is vying for everybody else's attention online, so I know that this means a lot.
Recently, I got into mail art (I learned that a lot of photographers don't know what this is. Follow the link if you want to find out more). I had always wanted to do something like that. When I saw Thomas Vandenberghe on Instagram instigating his own exchanges, I thought I might as well do it, too.
What I do is to put one of my thermal prints into a regular envelope. And then I fold another thermal print around it to produce the outer envelope.
You might remember from an earlier email that I ran into the problem of one of the clear tapes bleaching the prints. It seemed obvious to use this for my mail art: I write the addresses on the envelope, put that particular tape over it, wait a day, and voila!, the now fully legible envelope can go into the mail.
In the picture above, you get an ideas what the front and back of the envelopes look like (I hid the addresses). I simply put two envelopes right next to each other.
I had no idea how the thermal paper would handle being in the mail. Turns out it's doing great. Here's what the print looked like after it had been mailed to Belgium (picture taken by Thomas):
I think in my last email (I didn't check) I wrote about Bing's AI image generator (I also wrote about it on CPhMag.com). Enshittification is now proceeding at such a pace that apparently the thing is already unusable. Or maybe it's not, and it's just some people complaining. I didn't check whether there had been any changes, given that even before those, the results didn't work for me anyway.
The other day, I needed a good link for a different article on CPhMag.com, so I went to Google and (re-)found a very nice piece about Are-Bure-Boke from 2015. If you don't know these words, fret not: all you need to do to find out more is to read the article.
I seem to remember that I read and enjoyed it eight years ago already, and I certainly enjoyed reading it again.
I'm not the biggest fan of Hiroshi Sugimoto's work. It's very competently done, and it looks really nice. But somehow, it's all a tad too cerebral for me, lacking emotion (as always, your mileage might vary).
In 2019, I had the opportunity to visit Sugimoto's Enoura Observatory in Odawara. This is about an hour or so from Tokyo, right on the fabled tōkaidō (previously Japan's most famous road, now probably mostly known as the first ever Shinkansen route).
The Observatory sits atop a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and it's quite beautiful. And yet... I had the same feeling as with the photographs.
Regardless, despite my misgivings (if you even want to call it that), once I came across a new interview with Sugimoto, I thought I should read it. I had a hunch it would be good. And it is, albeit not for the reasons you might imagine (especially not, I suppose, if you're a fan).
ArtReview: After spending most of your professional life living in New York City, you recently returned to live in Tokyo. Why?
Hiroshi Sugimoto: New York is no longer so attractive to me because it’s been changed. Many of my friends have passed away or retired. Manhattan is not a place for young artists to play around, everything is so costly. I was in New York from 1974 and artists were mainly based in SoHo and Manhattan. There was an art community. Now there are only the galleries and rich people. The art market keeps getting bigger and bigger. And it keeps kicking artists out of the city. Art became a commodity. People buy art for future profit. Citibank approved art as an asset and will loan money using art as the collateral.
And this is just how it starts. Go read!
Ben Davis wrote another must-read article. This time, it's about how an artist who had become famous on TikTok and whose show he had reviewed sicced his social-media followers on him:
it seems to me that the majority of Rodriguez’s fans are most engaged by his appealing social-media persona, not his actual artworks. If this is the case, then it’s logical to think that it changes how criticism is perceived. His followers feel like I am attacking a person they like, not judging artworks or analyzing a media phenomenon. I think that explains the character of the reaction, which has a level of raw personal anger completely out of joint with what I wrote in my article.
On a much smaller scale, I run into this frequently. It might in part explain why photography criticism currently is in such a weird and -- to me -- quite unsatisfactory state.
Unless you live in the US (and even then), you might have no idea who the most photographed American in the mid to late 19th Century would have been. This article will tell you: it was Frederick Douglass, an intellectual who had an incredible life story.
"Late Saturday night I found myself writing a piece of antipropaganda," Talia Lavin writes, "It turned into something between a poem and a shopping list. I confess lately I have been trying to make sense of things through poetry. This would ordinarily be a paywalled feature, but call it a gift and consider a subscription. May we all get the impossible things we want."
It's amazing:
I want the blood to be unspilled, the buildings unbroken, the whirl of awful speech to slip back into open mouths, the words to be sucked back into the keyboards that birthed them. That is the first thing I want.
I'd love, love, love to tell you about something I have been working on these past two days. But it's still at the proposal stage for a public-art commission. Who knows whether it will happen? (It won't.) I should probably simply remain quiet about it.
With that, I want to thank you again for following along however many of the 100 emails you received and/or read.
Thank you for your time,
thank you for your attention,
thank you for the kind words that you occasionally send my way!
Until next time...
And of course thank you for reading this email,
-- Jörg