on their own terms, without the boxes
Welcome to another edition of this Mailing List!
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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It has been a while, and I have squirreled away a lot of material to share. So let’s get right to it.
“In Denmark,” Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg writes, “a place that markets itself as a beacon of gender equality, a recent study showed that books written by male authors were more likely to be reviewed than books by female authors; that male critics far outnumber their female counterparts; that men review books by other men more positively than books by women and that women review books by women even more negatively than men.”
The world of photography does not have the same numbers — numbers of books, of publishers, of readers, certainly not of main-stream media critics — but my gut instinct tells me we’d find the same here.
There is more to this article that’s very much worthwhile thinking about. “Why not”, it concludes, “read these authors on their own terms, without the boxes, rather than aiming to please the very same bastions of literary authority that “overlooked” and “forgot” them in the first place.”
Why not, if we were to apply the idea to photography, look at published works without adding the same labels. Even as I will admit that I personally do find value in pointing out that, say, a woman photographer has been overlooked for way too long, and even as I find value in pointing out the various mechanisms, Hellberg has a point in noting that that in itself might not solve the actual problem at hand.
How I will address this in my future writing I don’t know, yet.
Originally, I was going to share these 100 Tips That May (or May Not) Improve Your Next Novel here, but then I ended up writing a piece for CPhMag.com about it. You can read it here.
It’s only a very small step from what is being described in this article about the small-press distribution to a number of the problems in the world of the photobook. Distribution is a huge, huge problem.
This article by Andrew Norman Wilson might be the most savage and funny piece about the world of art that I have read in a long time. You will absolutely want to make time to read it.
Turns out a Japanese photographer produced the by far best photography around the civil war in Northern Ireland that for some reason are called The Troubles (what a quaint term for something so terrible!). There’s going to be a book in September. I’m really looking forward to it.
In this long article, photographer Rena Effendi writes about getting assaulted and dealing with the aftermath. A photograph she took of her own battered face plays a major role. She writes about the moments after she had shared it:
After years of photographing victims of sexual violence, I was exposing myself as a survivor. I was now “the story” and I felt out of place, unsettled – not in my usual comfort zone behind the camera. I spent the rest of the day checking the number of likes and shares as they ticked up and up. Just like my blogger friend had predicted, my crude anti-selfie went viral. Thousands of people responded, and a steady stream of sympathetic comments and messages followed. Men apologised on behalf of the taxi driver, while women expressed condolences that a horrible thing like this had happened to me. Several months later, I deleted my Facebook post. I didn’t want to be defined or remembered by the trauma I had experienced. This was not my real face, I thought. But, years later, in support of the #MeToo movement, I shared the image again to open a dialogue on the subject of social stigma around sexual assault. This time, the face stayed online.
It’s a searing read, and you might have to find the right time for it. Don’t read it on your phone. And sit down somewhere.
More photography and violence directed at women, albeit a different kind: “AI porn” (aka deepfakes). This article describes the fight against it (if you don’t know what it is, you will find out), centering on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself a target:
“It parallels the same exact intention of physical rape and sexual assault, [which] is about power, domination, and humiliation. Deepfakes are absolutely a way of digitizing violent humiliation against other people.”
Honestly, we shouldn’t be even having these kinds of problems to deal with. The fact that these digital tools even exist is a very shameful indictment of our society and, in particular, of the often deeply misogynistic world of tech.
I don’t want to conclude this email quite yet. There also is beauty in this world, for example the music produced by the Japanese band with the unfortunate name Mass Of The Fermenting Dregs. The name aside, they do everything right. The latest studio album is called Awakening:Sleeping, and it’s perfect. Added bonus (well, for me anyway): The songs are all sung in Japanese. Some songs are more poppy than others, and there’s a guest appearance by Taigen Kawabe, the bass player and singer of Bo Ningen (you might remember them from an earlier email).
By the way, they’re really good live. I mean this short session is incredible.
I have been thinking about producing my new work at least partly in colour. There’s only one problem: I am really bad at this. My camera is old, my computer is old, and I’m old.
Maybe I will figure it out.
Regardless, while I was driving to the dump (I live in a very small village, and it’s a lot cheaper to drive trash to the dump than to get it picked up), I noticed a few cherry trees blooming. One in particular looked just grand. So I went to photograph it later.
As it turned out, it wasn’t a cherry tree. And the photo didn’t come out as nice as I thought it would (oh, the difference between the photos in one’s head and outside…). But maybe you’ll enjoy seeing it anyway.
And with that I will conclude for today. If you enjoy these emails, feel free to share them with others. Or send me a response to let me know what you enjoyed, what you didn’t agree with, or whatever else pops into your mind.
As always thank you for reading!
— Jörg