The Place of Shells
How do you recommend a book without giving away too much about it? I guess what I will do is to provide some information that I found on a German website. Mai Ishizawa isn’t actually named Mai Ishizawa. It’s a pseudonym. She has been living in Germany since 2017 and is working on a doctorate in art history about Lucas Cranach the Elder. So there is some overlap between the author’s biography and that of her first novel, The Place of Shells. The narrator of the novel is a young Japanese woman working on her doctorate (art history) in Göttingen.
According to the article, the trigger for the book was the Covid pandemic with its resulting empty streets. This reminded Ishisawa of the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.
Ultimately, The Place of Shells is a novel that centers on coming to terms with loss and grief; but it also focuses in very smart ways on how we remember.
It’s an absolutely marvelous novel, a form of magical realism. I read it in small chunks, knowing that I would only be able to read it for the first time once. If you have not read it, you still have that pleasure ahead of you. So make good use of it!
“Photographs are historical artifacts;” Martha A. Sandweiss writes, “they are not history itself. History is dynamic, inherently about change over time. Photographs are static. They stop time dead still and focus our attention on what we can see. They suggest that what we see is somehow more important than what we can’t, that the moment fixed in the photographic image matters more than what happened just before or after. That is not always true. Sometimes, photographs do capture what photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called a “decisive moment.” But more often, they do not.”
Not all stories end happily: “By the mid-1980s he stopped taking photos – his cameras were lost, stolen, or sold, and he learned that his belongings, including negatives and prints that he’d left in a hotel storage room in New York, had been discarded. Cole was destitute and ill.”
But some of the work was rediscovered, and now there is a movie: Ernest Cole — Lost and Found.
Nobody would blame you if you said that you’re sick and tired of hearing about either Donald trump and/or Elon Musk. If you find the strength in yourself to deal with those people, make sure to read this article by Gideon Jacobs: “Donald Trump is a loud, painful symptom distracting from the disease: Silicon Valley, the internet in its current form, a spectacle that tends to bring out the worst in us and elevate the worst among us.”
Mental health break: this completely adorable song, basically an endless Japanese tongue twister, here seen as a cover version (which is better than the original).
Meanwhile, in the real world: “The tortuous negotiations seemingly dissipated last week when donor Robert Owen Lehman asked the museum to give him back the disputed bronzes, an extraordinary move that will require the MFA to close its Benin Kingdom Gallery by the end of the month.”
If the name Lehman somehow sounds familiar, yes, it’s that Lehman family.
Over at the resurrected Bookforum, Moira Donegan writes about Peter Hujar: “Mapplethorpe saw their shared New York art world as ushering in a new age and looked eagerly toward the strangeness and revolt of an optimistic future. But Hujar looked at that same world and saw it as fragile, temporary, endangered.”
There’s a lot of talk about generative AI now, most of it bad. This article by Sonja Drimmer is a rare exception. Make sure to read it! “Who owns these tools and systems,” Drimmer asks, “and what tangible or intangible benefits result from their use to frame art-historical inquiry?”
You can swap out the art-historical context and add in any other one — and it would still be the question to ask.
Lastly, I wrote a lengthy piece in which I tried to express some of the problems I see behind how we photolandians approach what we do:
photographers (fine art or otherwise, but certainly not those amateurs) act as proxies for the rest of the world: only through the hands of a photographer can the world be seen and appreciated.
The audience of such photography not only accepts it as the only and true vision of the world. It also outsources at least part of their conscience to the photographers. The photographers have to take on the role of their audience’s conscience, and most of them do so gladly.
I hope you will find the time to read that as well.
With that I will conclude. It’s a relatively cold day, one of those rare end-of-April days that feels more like a warmish early March day. But I went out and took some pictures, so now I will attend to those.
As always thank you for reading!
— Jörg