RIP Balltze
Welcome to the 92nd 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.
I never talk about my own writing on CPhMag.com here because I'm operating under the assumption that you might have read it already. Plus, I'm really allergic to self promotion, which obviously is not doing me any favours, whether as a writer or photographer.
These past few weeks, as I have been struggling with some rather enormous problems (looking for a job and a place to live at the same time) writing has been unexpectedly enjoyable.
If you're a fellow writer, you know that how that goes is largely out of your control. I'm an experienced enough writer that I can produce a piece about pretty much any photo project or book without any problems. But whether or not the piece will be particular inspired/inspiring is a different matter.
Whether or not a piece allows me to gain some insight myself also is something outside of my control. To be honest, for a while I was struggling with CPhMag.com. For a while, it didn't feel very rewarding (in the sense of the writing being rewarding). At times, it even felt like a burden.
As is the case with anything creative, you have to work through such episodes. Yes, writing is creative, and I think it's a lot harder than photography simply because it's much more difficult to buy into your own bullshit.
In any case, I'm actually really happy with some of the most recent pieces. For me (obviously, your mileage might vary), they get at what I have always been hoping to achieve with the site: intelligent discussions around photography that at least attempt to move the discourse a little, even if it's just a notch. So I thought I'd point out a few of these pieces. If you haven't read them, maybe these teasers will be interesting.
There's a new book about Daidō Moriyama out.
Brief aside: why do I write the first name using "ō"? Long story short, Japanese has short and long vowels. They're the exact same sound, but one is (you guessed it) shorter (that's the default) and one is twice as long. These markers are often not included when writing Japanese words with the Latin alphabet. We write Tokyo for the capital even though it's really Tōkyō, meaning when properly spoken the city's name is twice as long as you think it is.
Anyway, I can't say that I am particularly interested in Moriyama -- or rather I wasn't until a little while ago. The photographer's new work is an endless repetition of the same tiresome clichés (for the love of god, enough with the women's tights already!). But his early work actually is super interesting, and the catalogue allows you to dive into that.
You can find a lot more details about all of this in my piece.
A number of things came together that had me write this somewhat unusual obituary for a photography that unless you're Dutch you might have never heard of.
My feeling is that people read my articles based on whether they know about the artists already. I don't use tracking on my site, so I don't know whether that's correct. But there are so many aspects of Céline van Balen's life story that are interesting.
In any case, my piece really focuses on the so-called art world and its sheer disdain for ordinary people who basically only enter that world as the subjects of poverty-porn photographs (too many photographers have made a career out of that). Van Balen decided to drop out of that world twenty years ago.
My newest piece focuses on an aspect of photography that's underrated: its ability to create repetition. Out of that repetition possibly the most amazing effect might emerge, something I call the repetitive sublime. What this might mean and where you can find it -- read all about it here.
“I would go to academic conferences in AI, and I would see four or five Black people out of five, six, seven thousand people internationally.… I saw who was building the AI systems and their attitudes and their points of view. I saw what they were being used for, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God, we have a problem.’”
That's a quote by Timnit Gebru at the beginning of this long article about why AI is as problematic as it is. The worst part is that the women discussed in the article have been trying to warn people about the rather massive problem for a long time.
Just today, a long profile of Elon Musk emerged, written by Ronan Farrow. You want to read it, but: trigger warning -- it's really disturbing.
You might remember my $79 printer shenanigans from a little while ago. A few days after I sent out the email, Unai Mateo emailed me to tell me about his experiments with the same idea. His pictures are much nicer than mine, so you might as well enjoy them as well. I'm just sharing mine here, because I didn't have the time to ask Unai for permission to use his.
"It may be no coincidence," Roland Meyer writes, "that many of the images produced by Midjourney in its default mode have a striking affinity with the aesthetics of »Socialist Realism« - after all, they too are not depictions of real-world events, but »incarnations« of abstract concepts, as formulated in prompts." If you've read my book Photography's Neoliberal Realism (which by now might be sold out), you'll know how and why Meyer's observation rang a bell with me. Read his whole text (it's not that long, given it has to fit within the limits of an Instagram caption). Meyer might be the critic/theorist with the most insight about AI image generators.
Balltze has died. He was a very good boi. If you don't know anything about him, read up on him here. Here's an obituary. Cheems (as he was known online) played a huge role for NAFO, which in turn has played a rather big role in the information war over the war in Ukraine.
And there or rather here it is, the end of yet another email from my Mailing List. I hope that you enjoyed it and -- I don't know why I stopped writing this at some stage -- I hope that you're doing well. I know, people use the phrase in emails all the time. For what it's worth, I like the phrase. I mean it.
Thank you for reading!
-- Jörg