Odds and Ends and the Past
The other day, I realized that I needed to advertise the fact again that I'm mentoring photographers. I'm basically doing what I used to be doing when I taught in an MFA program, but I'm now doing it on my own. It's very flexible, depending on what a photographer might need. So far, I've helped a number of photographers develop their projects. But there also have been a number of books in the making.
If this is something that might interest you, check out the website -- or simply be in touch.
There's a first time for everything. Yesterday, I gave my first artist talk about Vaterland, my first photobook. I had never thought about what I would actually tell people about the work. As it turned out, putting together a presentation had me realize a few things about the work itself, in particular its connection to the German history I have lived through.
For example, in the late 1970s, there was a wave of left-wing terrorism in West Germany. I was nine years at the time, and I ended up deeply affected by what I saw and experienced around me. Even though I was very far from where things were actually happening, the state of hysteria that the country had allowed itself to be talked into clearly was felt in my home town. I remember seeing "Wanted" posters everywhere. This was the first time I engaged with photographs more consciously: I looked and looked at the faces and the names, trying to figure out what they were telling me.
That was a grim, grim time. In Germany, they called it die bleierne Zeit (the leaden time) where everything felt even more grey. I'm convinced that it's that grey that ended up making my pictures look the way they look. Before putting my talk together, I hadn't spent much time thinking about the grey, other than knowing that I wanted it to convey a certain feeling. Now I know that it's the feeling I experienced when I was 9, 10 years old. I can't say that I remember anything else from that time.
It's strange how some thing stay with you while others completely disappear. The other day, I remembered that in my last year of high school I went on a trip to West Berlin. It must have been in 1986. I remember almost nothing from that trip. I have no recollection where we stayed or what we looked at. There was a trip to East Berlin (everybody had to go on their own) but even this I barely remember. I actually have more memories from a trip to East Germany that happened the year before.
Speaking of memory, a few years ago, I remembered how when I was in high school I devoured pulp-fiction crime novels by Edgar Wallace. I own a small collection of other novels of this type (I'm a big fan of noir). So I thought I might as well track down some of the books and re-read them. On eBay, I found a set of the novels produced in the 1950s -- great covers. So I bid on them, and won.
Once I opened one of the books, I couldn't believe how bad they actually are. They're incredibly shoddily written, making them unreadable. I seem to remember that Wallace actually dictated them, for someone else to type them up.
How could I have possibly enjoyed reading such crap decades earlier? I know full well that I have changed over the course of my life time. But to find my former self enjoying something that was so bad... That was a shock. Maybe the closest equivalent to these novels are songs by Depeche Mode. I spent a lot of time listening to them when I was a lot younger. But now, I can't listen to them any longer, given how bad they are. There's almost no sense of melody, and where there are faint traces, they are cartoonishly simplistic.
In light of what I wrote above, you can maybe understand how I don't look back too fondly to the times I grew up in. The late 1970s were just grim, and the 1980s were hardly any better in West Germany. Like I wrote above, I now know how that background has seeped into my photography. I don't have a problem working with that, even as I'm thinking that it would be nice to push beyond it.
This is the difficult thing in photography: it's so hard to be someone else. I'm sure I wrote about this in an earlier email, but I'd love to take photographs that have the quality Rinko Kawauchi's have. I know that I will be never able to achieve that. In some ways, I'm fine with that. If I could just emulate or copy everything I admire, it probably would lose its magic: isn't the magic exactly based on the fact that something is unattainable?
With that I'm going to conclude for today. As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg