The Long Shadow
Welcome to the 95th 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.
Four years after I finished Vaterland, I have a new body of work to share with you. It's called The Long Shadow, and you can see a sneak preview on my website.
I'm using the term "sneak preview" because the project really needs the form of a book to work. For the first time, I'm combining my own photographs with other people's words, and the overall arrangement matters.
The online version will give you pretty good idea of what the work is about; but you need to see the whole. I'm hoping that I can make that happen.
Last weekend, in a bout of creativity, I produced a full dummy, which much to my surprise ended up materializing much more quickly than when I made Vaterland.
I had been telling students that as you grow, things will get easier. Apparently, I had not believed in the lessons I'm teaching.
After Vaterland, I had the ambition for the next book to become more complicated. In other words, I did not make another book that worked along the lines used there. There's nothing wrong with that approach. But I wanted to grow as a photographer.
A trip to Budapest in May this year provided the opportunity to make new work. Given the overlap between recent German and Hungarian history, I didn't think I should simply make a variant of Vaterland. After all, I am not Hungarian, so I can't speak to what it feels like to be one.
Instead, I decided to photographically focus on Hungarian history as I would encounter in there. As it turned out, there was almost too much. It was everywhere.
In addition to taking photographs, I decided that I would speak with Hungarians and have them tell me about the country. My hope was and still is that the two parallel strands come together to say something about Hungary under Viktor Orbán.
Like I said, you can look at the web preview of The Long Shadow yourself.
"Given the vast difference in agency prevailing between artists and patrons," Andrea Scrima asks, "is an intellectual, artistic, ethical discussion on equal terms even possible?" The article dives deeply into the topic, without shying away from some brutal truths:
Art, we remind ourselves, always exists in close proximity to power and its inherent brutality. Oddly, a civilization’s greatness or lack thereof is often judged less by the cruelty of its social organization or economy than the degree to which it enables art to prosper.
There was a fascinating sentiment expressed by Tokuko Ushioda in this short video. Speaking of her husband (himself a photographer; in the video you can see him lurk in the back), she said "He thought Japanese photographers had not respect for people's dignity."
You'll have to remember that this is the generation that you know from the likes of Nobuyoshi Araki, Daidō Moriyama, and Masahisa Fukase.
With those gentlemen in mind, I can see where the sentiment would be coming from, even though I had not heard it expressed by a member of that generation herself.
Watch it! Tokuko Ushioda is a marvelous photographer who, I should add, did more than those fridge photos mentioned in the video.
I think you want to ask yourself that question as a photographer: do I have respect for people's dignity?
I mean people's as in: other people's, not your own.
I don't know who has the time to listen to all those podcasts that exist. I can't listen to them when I'm doing something, except when I go on my walks. Then, I need something that distracts me from how annoyed I am about how stupid walking really is.
The other day, I came across a channel that I had saved but not listened to so far. I decided to check it out.
I first listened to an episode with Nick Cave, the sculptor not the singer. That was incredible. When you listen to a real artist talk, it's usually amazing.
And then I listened to an episode with Michael Bierut, the famed designer. Especially as a photographer, you want to spend time with this episode. To begin with, you learn what design actually is and what designers actually do. I think most photographers have no idea. But then you also learn so much about this man's life and his approach to work. Even if I don't have the disposition to follow in his footsteps -- I can only dream of having his serenity -- it's inspiring.
So much to learn.
It never ends.
Lastly, this mockumentary around a filmmaker who obviously is supposed to be Werner Herzog is brilliant. How do you make a parody of a gifted man who actually is his own parody? Here's how. Even the added role for Fred Armisen (who needs to show up in every one of these mockumentary's, at least the ones I've seen) is unable to ruin it.
And there you have it, today's newsletter. I hope you're doing well, which given the state of the world isn't so easy any longer. Stay cool, stay dry, stay safe!
Thank you for reading!
-- Jörg