Snap!
Welcome to the 105th 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.
The other day, something snapped. I had been very unhappy with Instagram for a while. What used to be a fun photography app is now merely a hot mess, a mix of things ripped off from competitors, with the original photography part long having become an afterthought. To make matters worse, Facebook's algorithm not only imposes harsh censorship, it also limits who will see what you post. That number they show you as your "followers" -- not all of those people will see what you post. A small fraction will. Depending on how much "engagement" a post generates, this might be 10%, 20%... Or less. A friend of mine noted yesterday, 6% of people had seen one of her posts. A well-known Tokyo-based photographer and writer reported 3%.
I have been mostly on Instagram to see what photographers are up to. What made things snap was my discovery of a photobook. It wasn't the fact that I discovered and ordered it, it was the fact that such discoveries have become so incredibly rare. It's not because there are no books to be discovered. It's because Instagram's algorithm hides from me what I'm interested in. In other words, the algorithm gets in the way of Instagram's most important photo aspect for me.
So I posted "RIP Instagram", wrote a few angry words and told people that my own activities there will become very sporadic. That then was my by far most impactful post. A whooping 60% of my "followers" saw this. Whoop-dee-doo!
As a consequence of my post, quite a few people signed up to this Mailing List. If you're one of them: welcome!
I've been thinking about this for a while. This Mailing List should become a little bit more professional. There are some things I should do, simply because they make sense. It's not that I'm unprofessional per se. It's just that so far, I enjoyed the mostly spontaneous nature of things. So I will try to combine the two and see how it goes.
Since my last email, I published two articles on CPhMag.com:
I reviewed Thana Faroq's how shall we greet the sun. For all kinds of reasons, the book really resonated with me. I could have written more about it; but I think that there is only so much that people will want to (or can) read online.
If you remember the last email I sent, I mentioned Claire Dederer's book Monsters. I finished reading it -- it's incredible, and I wrote an article about it. As far as I'm concerned, it's a must-read book not only for its incredible insight but also because it has the potential to move the general conversation forward. It should be widely read in MFA programs to prepare students for the world they're about to enter.
I don't know whether you followed the news from Poland. After eight years of a neofascist government, there now is a new democratic government. In these eight years, the old government caused massive damage (including banning abortion). In the cultural sector, the government stuffed institutions with party hacks. How will things evolve in the cultural sphere now? Frieze Magazine asked a few Polish artists and curators. Not all are hopeful. "In the last eight years," says Natalia Sielewicz, "the Law and Justice Party has attempted to turn cultural institutions into an ideological weapon and resource for its apparatchiks and allies. It is hard to foresee how long it will take to undo the damage."
The last time I was in Poland (2017), the contemporary-art museums in Warsaw were more interesting than anything I'd find in Germany or the US. To what extent they have suffered, I can't tell. I'll have to see the next time I'll be able to visit.
There was a really interesting story in the New York Times recently. A writer had written a complimentary review of some Jeff Koons piece. The magazine sent it to the artist's studio, and they actually vetoed it. It was never published.
As far as I can tell, there was actually no reason for the studio/artist to take offense. The sentence in question was a compliment -- unless you read it too quickly or you're not fully literate. But maybe I'm wrong. You can judge for yourself.
Of course, the much larger problem is the fact that an artist can simply kill writing about himself. The magazine has no choice because the artist's pockets are deep, and even if the magazine would win in court the financial costs would be much too high.
This is not an unusual situation, a German critic wrote a whole book about it that, alas, has not been translated into English, yet. It's just one more example of to what extent money has perverted the world of art.
I have a long piece coming on CPhMag.com that I'm really looking forward to. I'll publish it on Monday (the 25th), and then I'll leave it up until early January. It's an excerpt from the unpublished manuscript I mentioned before. There's going to be a re-issue of Richard Billingham's Ray's a Laugh (sadly in modified form). I cover the work in my book, and I figured I might as well share that section (in slightly edited form so it works as a stand-alone piece). Stay tuned!
With that I will conclude for today. I hope you're going to enjoy the holidays (should you celebrate), and I hope you're going to have a wonderful New Year! Until then!
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg