The Masterlist of 15 Differences
Welcome to the 94th 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.
Those of you who paid attention probably noticed that last time I used the wrong number up there in my header. Not that it really matters. Who's counting?
So here is another email, even though I had just sent one. Had I not said that these emails arrive roughly every two weeks? Well, yes and no. As has been the case before, I don't want to accumulate too much stuff.
This is a bit low-resolution but it's too good not to share. I already don't recall where I found this. Maybe it was on Instagram.
While working on my book manuscript, I decided to add in some pictures. If you've ever worked with Microsoft's Word or Apple's Pages, you know that the moment you add pictures you're... what's the word? Ah yes: screwed.
How or why these programs make it so insanely difficult to add in pictures escapes me. Even worse, the moment you try to move a single picture all hell breaks loose as every pictures somehow moves on its own somewhere else.
There might be reasons, and those reasons might make sense for wherever the developers of those programs are located. But they don't make sense for normal people.
Now, don't argue with me about whether writers or photo critics are normal people. They're obviously not. Still, as a writer I do not want to study some abstract software concepts for what should be a really simple and obvious task.
I found this yesterday. Maybe it will make you laugh. I just love the fact that it communicates that these people are stealing cars (that somehow fit into those boxes), even though the caption says otherwise. But that's design for you, right? People will see big bold text first and then relate that to a picture in the most obvious (here incorrect) fashion.
Speaking of my book, while working on the latest version of the manuscript, I poked around on the internet in order to find an example for a discussion around a selfie someone had taken at an inappropriate location (or occasion). I found this article from 2014:
On June 20, a newly minted high school graduate from eastern Alabama walked into the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, paused in front of a barracks … and took a picture of herself. The despicable nature of all of this is self-evident, right? Smiling teen with one earbud in. Blushing emoji, as if she realizes she should be ashamed — but isn’t. And then there are her follow-up tweets, dozens and dozens of threats and defenses and angry replies, all of them simmering down to one blood-boiling theme: Sorry, but I’m not sorry.
What I like about the article is that instead of joining the condemnations, Caitlin Dewey, the author, dove into the conflicting aspects of what happened and the young woman's motivations, arriving at
Maybe an Auschwitz selfie can also be a sincere — if misguided — kind of tribute.
Even as I personally don't think I would take a selfie there, to an extent I still can understand the young woman's motivations.
If we want to pull back a bit, at the core of a lot of these discussions lies the intersection of what is appropriate but also how we individually express what is appropriate.
I think there are two different problems here. First, many people wrap what is appropriate and how we individually express what is appropriate into one big whole. The second problem is that many people think that how they behave is how other people ought to behave. And if they don't do that, then those other people's motivations surely ought to be flawed.
As the article shows, that is absolutely not the case. I'd argue that a lot of photography operates in that same weird zone even if the Auschwitz selfie obviously is an extreme case.
As a photographer or a viewer, you want to be careful with your assumption that what you think is right is automatically the universal way of approaching things. It might not be.
Speaking of book, today I realized that I might have to work with a literary agent to get my book published. So if you either are a publisher and you want to see my book, or if you know literary agents that can help me: could you be in touch, please?
Found this today. It's really funny. But you could also use it for undergraduate teaching to have a discussion about what art actually is and what it might do.
"If you put all the world’s knowledge into an AI model and use it to make something new, who owns that and who gets paid?" Benedict Evans asks. "This is a completely new problem that we’ve been arguing about for 500 years."
More on AI: "You can’t ask for images that don’t ultimately look like an ad," Rob Horning writes, "because advertising’s logic of symbolic communication is already programmed into how the models work fundamentally." And:
Generative models explicitly want to save us the work of imagination; they reinforce the pleasure that comes from strictly recognizing what ideas an image is trying to sell us. While models would seem to shore up the meanings of images — assigning specific statistically derived images to each and every concept — in practice they deplete images of their utopian potential and make them rote and one-dimensional.
Boom!
Meanwhile, German newspaper taz asked me to write an op-ed (if that's the word) about smartphone photography, in particular about the strange aesthetic that has invaded it. The piece was published today (print edition: 29 August 2023), and you can access it online here.
If you can't read German, either use DeepL (via a browser add on; it's the best machine translation available) or click on this link, which will give you Google's clunky yet workable machine translation.
At the core of my piece sits the following idea (my translation):
We could discuss endlessly about the extent to which photos really represent reality. Such a debate only becomes interesting if we don't ask ***whether*** a photo depicts reality, but rather ***whose*** reality it depicts.
It would seem that following that logic, photography has simultaneously become more democratic by providing easy access to cameras and less democratic by giving people photographs that look a certain way (which is dictated by capitalist considerations).
Lastly, this week I published a long piece on Helmut Newton's photography, which I've always found to be incredibly sexist and misogynistic. In the piece, I'm explaining why it is that and crucially why his inclusion of seemingly strong, confident female characters does not prove at all that it's not sexist and misogynistic.
Two of my main points:
The interaction between the heterosexual men and women in Newton’s photographs plays out on a territory that’s demarcated by a narrow definition of what masculinity means. It’s the territory of power and domination. Therein, you have two options available to you: you can surrender, or you can fight.
And:
Helmut Newton’s photography is not sexist and misogynistic if you use criteria for its evaluation that themselves are sexist and misogynistic: your inability to see what’s on full display betrays your inability to recognize the sexist and misogynistic societal structure you’re embedded in.
And that's it for today. I'll try to slow down with these emails (but I won't promise anything).
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg