Sometimes, things can’t be helped.
On Friday, I’m going to travel to Germany for personal reasons. I am not looking forward to the one week I’ll be spending there. But obligations are, well, obligations. Sometimes, things can’t be helped.
The trip serves as a timely reminder to send out another email, and that’s what I will do.
I’m not very good at this, but I should probably mention that there are spots available in the 9×9 Masterclass I’m planning to teach. I really enjoyed the first iteration, so if you’re interested, be in touch!
In 1941, Dorothy Thompson wrote an article entitled Who Goes Nazi? “I have come to know the types,” she wrote, “the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.” Perhaps not surprisingly, the article reads as if it had been written the other day.
Speaking of Nazis, the other day Germany’s current chancellor Friedrich Merz publicly went all in on his own racism and xenophobia. He’s catching a lot of flak for this, but many members of his own supposedly conservative party have been voicing their support.
I don’t think Dorothy Thompson would have been surprised about the, in her words, “certain-to-be fellow-traveler”.
The things you can do with old photographs: it’s really not that clear to me what exactly the “AI” is supposed to have done to identify the soldier in a well-known photograph from the Holocaust. After all, someone “came forward and said he believed, based on correspondence from the era in his family’s possession, that the gunman could be his wife’s uncle, Jakobus Onnen.” But ignoring the “AI” aspect, this is a really good example of how you can pinpoint the locations of photographs with just a few pointers.
“There are cases of important literary and historical works that survive in only one or two manuscripts,” Robert Bartlett writes, “If they had suffered some accident, then our picture of the past might be altered in important ways.”
It’s crazy to imagine how many things really just depended on luck and chance.
You might remember how I mentioned an article about Kara Walker and her transformation of a confederate monument in a previous email. In that article, there was not photograph of the end result. But now photographs have emerged, and you want to see them.
Caleb Klaces wrote something about the use of photographs in fiction, “thinking, in particular, about what the picture ‘knows’ that the words do not.”
Lastly, a couple of weeks ago I published a longer article about Richard Avedon and his photographs of his ailing father. I’m usually extremely critical of my writing and incredibly self-conscious. But somehow, I still feel that it’s a piece of writing that I happily point out to others. Maybe you’ll find time to read it.
The leaves are now changing colours rapidly, meaning that in the few days before my flight I will be able to enjoy New England fall colours. It’s a little bit like Japanese cherry blossoms, except that it’s the inverse: instead of heralding spring, it is a final reminder that the days of summer are absolutely over. Still, the explosion of beauty is hard to ignore, especially on days like this, days that start and end with a bright sun in the sky.
As always thank you for reading!
— Jörg