There's something wrong with us
Welcome to the 85th 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.
I used to be active on Twitter. Then Elon Musk bought it, and I left. Mastodon was a replacement, and now I got an invite code to Bluesky [sic!]. It's great to have replacements, but mostly they don't work. Somehow, you cannot replicate the experience of some site, regardless of how shitty it has become. That's also why there will never be a replacement for Instagram (which just the other day served me an ad for -- I kid you not -- pig brain). I don't think that it's too much work to set up something new, even though that plays a part. Instead, it's that doing the same thing again elsewhere just isn't the same as doing it for the first time in the company of a lot of other people who are equally excited about it as you are.
Know what I'm saying?
Anyway, this isn't a very good time in my life right now, but I'll spare you the details.
Instead, I'll just say that in my creative life I am preoccupied with two books.
There's a book of writing that I have been working on for a while. Two years ago, I thought it was finished. I shopped it around in photoland without any success. Earlier this year, during a long walk, I realized how unsatisfied I had become by the fact that I had not pursued the book more. The only person who had kindly offered some feedback (someone working for an academic publisher, which definitely would have been the wrong place to publish it) had told me that he thought the topic is great, but that the writing still needed work. At the time, I wasn't quite sure what to make of that. But when I re-looked at it this year I knew. So I started working on it again, which meant editing and expanding it. The original manuscript had about 12.5k words (which, if you have no idea how long that is, is about 25% longer than one of those longer pieces in New Yorker magazine). I'm now at roughly double that number, and everything feels a lot more resolved.
To describe the book as a book about photography is maybe 50% correct. But for me, the idea of the book is that photography really only is the starting point. To be honest, over the past few years I have got less and less interested in writing about photography. Besides the fact that the audience size is very limited, as much as I love photography I also love a lot of other things. And a lot of those other things are always absent when people talk about photography. That's why my writing on CPhMag.com dives into so many things. I now only review a photobook when it offers me a chance to essentially write about something else.
So the book is about a lot of things, some major, some minor. The big overarching theme is masculinity as it plays out -- often in a very unhealthy fashion -- between fathers and sons. What might that lead to when those sons happen to have a camera? To some extent, the book is also autobiographical. It needed to be, because no son can write about other sons and their fathers without dealing with his own baggage.
The book is not quite done, yet. But it's getting there. Once it's done, I will try to find a non-photo publisher. Obviously, I have no illusions that it will be possible. But I'll try.
The second book is one of my own photography: the pictures I took in Budapest. I want to push this beyond what I did with Vaterland, so I decided to incorporate text. I've been speaking with a number of Hungarian people to produce that text; and I've already learned so much. This book is mostly in its very early stages, and who knows whether I can even make it happen (to make a book, you need money, which I don't have).
All of the above really centers on what I've learned about the role of creativity in my life. Even in the worst of circumstances, being able to exercise my creativity nourishes and comforts me. Creativity always entails leaving my comfort zone (I would argue that by definition, the word creativity contains that aspect, even though I suppose some people would define creativity as something a lot more limited). That's very difficult when times are difficult. But I always keep an eye on the medium to long term. Even in the best of times, creative struggles are never pleasant when they occur. When you step back, though, and you see your own growth, or when you see how even in that struggle there's a fire glowing inside you -- that's when you realize how beneficial creativity really is.
Originally, I wasn't going to write all of the above when I decided to produce an email this morning. I have vague hopes that sharing part of my own process might be useful and/or helpful.
If there is one thing that really bothers me it's the fact that in the world of photography, struggles aren't mentioned. They're not happening. Photographers never talk about all the stuff that doesn't work. It's almost as if that destroyed the mystique.
For a number of reasons, that's too bad. To begin with, it sets unrealistic expectations. If you're a photographer and you're struggling, but nobody else ever is, then clearly something must be wrong with you, right?
Well, obviously, there's nothing wrong with you; instead, there's something wrong with us that collectively, we pretend that creative struggles and failures have to be hidden away.
Regardless, this brand new video brought me a lot of joy. It's Tokyo based collective ELECTRONICOS FANTASTICOS! performing with a pair of rappers. It's easily the coolest thing you'll see and hear for a while.
If you're curious about those instruments, watch this video (switch on English subtitles!). At the beginning, one of the band members explains what they're doing and how it all works. And then they perform with a dancer who is wearing a bar-coded dress. It's incredible.
If you are paying attention to what's going on in the New York art scene -- which honestly has some very weird small-town vibes that none of its participants are even remotely aware of -- you might have heard about the Pablo-matic kerfuffle. If you haven't, you have not missed anything (yet).
Either way, in both cases, you will want to read Ben Davis' two-part article about the exhibition in question (part 1, part 2). It's a long read, but it's worth it. Davis tackles a lot of issues, many of which extend far beyond that exhibition.
One of the most crucial points come right near the end:
What alarms me about the spectacle of “It’s Pablo-matic” is the evidence that art institutions aren’t able to make better arguments, aren’t able to adjust, aren’t able to assess what has happened in the last five years or where they stand in the escalating doom loop of “woke” and “anti-woke” factionalization.
Outside of the context of that exhibition, this is something I'm incredibly worried about.
For example, roughly 20% of Germans are currently on record as supporting the neofascist AfD party. And you can tell that German conservatives are just one short step away from forming governments with them (mark my words). Would you know any of this from what's on display in German art or photography museums or from the discussions happening in that scene? Absolutely not.
Speaking of doom, here are a couple more articles about AI.
What might AI really mean for the internet? This article addresses some of the issues.
And this article deals with what potentially might be the most worrisome aspect of AI. It's not images that look like photographs. It's surveillance.
Lastly, something from the world of photography. For years, I have argued against age limits in competitions and prizes. Obviously, nobody listens to me, and so age limits persist.
But maybe it's easier to see the problems if you look at something other than photography. Jessica Rudman wrote an essay about the topic from the point of view of a composer.
people who start composing later and take a less traditional path are most often women, people of color, and people from lower socioeconomic statuses or geographic areas where access to arts education is limited. These individuals may well have aged out of young-composer competitions before they really even began pursuing such opportunities. Considering who this excludes, defining “emerging” in terms of age limits contributes to applicant pools remaining predominantly white, male, and affluent.
It's straightforward to adapt the essay to the world of photography.
I might as well wrap it up and make myself a late breakfast.
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg