Looks like supererogatoriness isn't an actual word
Welcome to the 87th 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.
Originally, I was going to send out these emails every two weeks. But lately, there has been so much material that sticking to that schedule would mean either shortening what I write around it or sending out much longer emails. I don't necessarily want to do either, so here's another email.
After I sent out my last email, some of you wrote in to send words of support. Things really aren't very pleasant for me right now, so I thought I should say again how grateful I am for that.
You (meaning: I) sit at my desk, writing and then sending out an email into what occasionally feels like a void. It's not really a void, of course, because you are there. And I could look at the statistics to check how many emails were opened or read or whatever else might be available. But this feels creepy to me, even if you might not care or mind. It feels a bit like looking at the number of "likes" on social media.
For the longest time, I've also been worried about the issue of pandering. As a writer, in fact as an artist in general, you want to do the things that you truly believe in, trusting (or maybe "hoping" would be a better word) that it will resonate. For that reason, I removed all analytics from CPhMag.com, which, alas, now means I don't have any "metrics" to use in job applications. Oh well...
If I could (maybe it's good that I am unable to), I'd visit each and every one of you at home to make sure that you read this absolutely incredible conversation between Marvin Heiferman and Nan Goldin. Obviously, I can't do that. In any case, that would be really creepy.
But the reality is that while I think that all the material that I share is good enough for me to share it, some of it is important or simply very good. Essential even. That conversation is an example. It's essential.
Just check out this small excerpt:
Marvin: I remember standing on a street in the East Village, screaming up at Brian's window, trying to get him to come downstairs to sign a model release. And he wouldn’t. I remember that there were some pictures of him – on the toilet, after he’d just come -- he didn’t want used. And I know that long after the book was printed and reprinted, there’s people who’ve wished their pictures weren’t in it.
Nan: And my father didn't want me to publish the book, because he thought I was trying to prove that he killed my sister, Barbara. That was a huge thing that went on behind the scenes.
Brian, you might remember, is the abusive boyfriend who is in many of the photographs, the man who physically abused Nan Goldin.
Or this:
Marvin: When the slideshows started screening with some regularity and people saw themselves onscreen or in prints became somewhat known for that, did they pose more, trying to represent the themselves the way they wanted to see themselves?
Nan: I think everyone does. Wolfgang Tillmans photographed me two weeks ago and when he sent them, he asked, "Do you see yourself in them?" That's a really good question, since I don’t even see myself in the mirror it’s tricky. I walk around with a very different image of myself in my head.
I remember a while ago, Steidl published a huge, huge book about Robert Frank's The Americans that was nauseatingly hagiographic.
But imagine a huge, huge book about The Ballad of Sexual Dependency along the lines of this conversation. The whole story of that work gets more interesting every time I read about it (usually, especially with photography the opposite is the case). Actually, I'd even settle for a much longer conversation between Heiferman and Goldin, something along the lines of what Sean O'Hagan just produced with Nick Cave (the singer, not the sculptor).
Completely unrelated and completely different in spirit: I recently came across an academic article that looks into how Western photojournalists are remembered after their untimely deaths. It's an academic read (meaning it uses the kind of rigid repetitiveness that is so common in that kind of writing), but it's filled with very critical insight:
The construction of the journalist as a moral hero redescribes the conflict journalist as one who undertakes supererogatory moral acts, where a supererogatory moral act is understood as something that is morally praiseworthy to do, but which nobody can reasonably be asked to undertake.
"Supererogatory" basically means "superfluous". I would have used the latter, not just because it is more common (even if it possibly does not quite have all the same nuance). I simply love the sound of the word "superfluous". I'm the kind of writer who picks some words over others because of the way they sound. "Superfluous" is great because of the way it flows. In contrast, the many syllables in "supererogatory" not only sound clumsy, they also feel gratuitous: You're showboating (and you know it).
Academic writing obviously follows the German model: why do it in a simple fashion when it can be done in a very complicated manner? Academics love their wordy superfluousness, where you add "ness" to every adjective that's en vogue. Funnily enough, you can't do that with supererogatory. There's no such thing as supererogatoriness (even though I guess you could create the word). It's simply supererogation. Also, instead of superfluousness you could simply use "excess".
Anyway, another good snippet from the article:
Rather than being accidental witnesses or bearing witness as a form of work, journalists are variously described as being on a mission, pursuing a vocation or answering a challenge
The conclusion:
War and the reporting of it remains an urgent and important endeavour. Yet, honours are never without politics. Understanding the terms through which war reporting’s heroes are constructed might yet tell us something important about the moral universe in which the subfield is practising – and the interests that this may or may not serve.
There are a lot more details in the article (which, I should note, is not hidden behind an academic paywall). It's an essential read even if you're not necessarily interested in photojournalism. Some of its ideas can be easily found in the arts as well.
Mark Neville now calls Ukraine his home. In this article, he talks about what it's like to live in a country at war, and he talks about his own work in that context.
For a long time, Mark has tried making work that is conscious of reaching the right audiences (which more often than not meant making photobooks for an audience outside of photoland), or in his words
how can the subjects of my photographs become the primary audiences and beneficiaries of the images over and above visitors to art exhibitions, photo book collectors and generic audiences
I have become very interested in this topic. I feel that photoland is too much of a secluded bubble that while producing grandiose work about what's outside actually often has no idea what's really going on there.
This had to happen: someone had their iPhone photograph rejected from a competition because the judges were unable to tell whether it had been made with AI or not.
The truly interesting thing is that the judges actually had a point. The iPhone does indeed use AI to enhance the photographs it produces. It's just a different type of AI than the one where you feed some "prompt" into an interface to get a picture. If you want to learn more about this, read this article (btw, I'm using Halide, an app discussed therein, and I'm very happy with it).
But some form of AI isn't the same as some other form of AI, at least not in the eyes of the world of photography. Whatever you might think about AI, it won't surprise you to learn that I think that focusing on AI is either a red herring or simply a mistake. Mind you, the kind of mistake that people have been making every since photography was invented and improved. It's like I said in an earlier email, I don't care how a picture was made, I am interested in how it is being used and what that use communicates.
I was very briefly excited to learn about a new photo app that appeared to be doing everything right that Instagram is now doing wrong (if you must know). I even installed it on my phone and got started. But then someone alerted me to the section in their user agreement (which obviously I hadn't read) that speaks about the rights you grant them when you use the app. I immediately deleted my account and removed the app from my phone.
At this stage, it's probably fair to conclude that Silicon Valley is little more than an abusive pest (even as that might be an understatement).
And here it is, the conclusion of yet another email from my Mailing List. If you like what you see in these emails, feel free to forward them to friends who might be interested.
And as always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg