This Is The End (Of 2021)
It's the end of another year. Looking back, 2021 appears to have been mostly filled with disappointments for me: another year of the pandemic, no traveling to Europe or Japan, plus a number of professional setbacks.
Well, onward then.
I'd like to use this opportunity to thank you for following along. This mailing list for sure has been the most rewarding thing I've done this year, and I intend to keep going with it. In a number of ways, writing these emails has invigorated my own practice, for which I'm intensely grateful.
Back when I was young, one of my favourite times of the year was the time period between Christmas and New Year's Day. In Germany, we called it "the time between the years." I still love that expression. There were no expectations and nobody had to do anything major (unlike in summer, say, where there always was the pressure of making sure one enjoyed one's time). Things were quiet.
Now that I'm an adult (who is working from home) the time between the years isn't all that different than the rest. But every year, I try to take a little bit more time for myself in those final days of the year. It's worth it.
One thing I've been working on the past few months has now materialized. I've always been fascinated by Risograph printing. In a nutshell, if you want to think of a Risograph printer as a specialized form of a Xerox printer, you're not far off. But imagine that the printer can accommodate a large number of different colours, and you're in business. Risograph prints have their own look and feel to them, much like, say, newsprint. That picture here is a scan of such a print. The digital reproduction does it only partial justice, but that's obviously true for almost any photographic print.
I worked with an expert on Risograph printing and had sets of prints from my book Vaterland made. Each set consists of the same 5 motifs. The prints were done using black and white (!) ink. In standard photo-printing lingo, they're duotones. You might wonder what point there is to print white ink on white paper. But the white ink was used as a second layer on top of the black ink. So it allowed for the creation of a smoother image that are close to what the photographs look like in the book (or as silver-gelatin prints). No two different printing methods ever look completely alike. The prints do look like Risograph prints, but they're a lot more detailed and smoother than many other such prints.
I'm going to sell the sets for $75 (the prints are all signed, and there's an edition of 45; the images are 8"x10" on slightly larger sheets of paper). Details will be forthcoming; but if this might interest you feel free to drop me a note and put an order in already.
I obviously have to say this as the person selling the prints, but they look absolutely spectacular. Here's the scan of one of the other prints:
Lastly, I want to draw your attention to this article entitled Apply Now!, subtitled Or why does success have a paywall? In it, photographer Aaron Hardin writes about an aspect of photoland that doesn't get as much public attention as it should:
"As someone who comes from a blue-collar family, the “success paywall” of photoland is often disheartening and demoralizing. [...] I envy the tables full of food and amazing photographers that I see on social media after events. But it just isn’t realistic for my finances or my work."
This predicament isn't that uncommon. A lot of photographers struggle with how to finance their work and/or getting access to things that can help them succeed.
I remember the times when I was teaching in some MFA program that shall not be named. All the other photographers were constantly talking about all the great new digital cameras they were buying. In contrast, I did all my work with the most basic model of the Nikon D800 that I bought used (it's still the camera I use). And I could tell: once I brought up money, I'd be getting the knowing glances. Privilege is a hell of a drug.
Regardless, thank you again for following along this year. I hope you will be enjoying the final days of 2021, and I hope 2022 will have lots of good things for all of us in store.
Thank you for reading,
Jörg