Tools, tools, tools
This is a self-portrait by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, a Polish artist more commonly known as Witkacy. I first came across him when I saw a 1912 photographic self-portrait in an exhibition in Warsaw in 2017:
As it turned out Witkacy was a prolific artist, working on photography, paintings, plays, texts... Given his wicked sense of humour, he produced an enormous amount of incredible material (note: "wicked" here as used in Boston, please). If you want to learn more about an artist you definitely should know more about, this article offers a good introduction to some of his work (and ideas).
To think is the great privilege of Man. Precisely in this effort he becomes something more than an animal. A refusal of this privilege is nearly always conscious. And unforgivable.
A little while ago, I found an interview with Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Rafeyenko on Twitter. I had never heard of Rafeyenko before. But that doesn't mean much, given that with the exception of Olga Tokarczuk, my personal focus has been on Japanese literature for quite some time. Regardless, the interview is absolutely incredible -- and heartbreaking in many ways. There is a lot of material covered (I find it hard to imagine a conversation with, say, an American writer that could this deeply into philosophy), and this includes language. Rafeyenko:
At the beginning of the century, I positioned myself as a Ukrainian writer who also functions in the Russian cultural-linguistic sphere. It never entered my mind to write in Ukrainian. After 2014, I learned Ukrainian and wrote a novel in Ukrainian, to show Russians and anyone else that even for a Russophone Ukrainian, learning Ukrainian is not a problem – and not only learning it well enough to speak it, but also learning it well enough to write literary texts. And I said more than once in interviews that from this point on, I would write books in both languages – one novel in Russian, one in Ukrainian. I very much wanted it to be clear to everyone that the problem of defending the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine has never existed – nor does it now, though it was precisely with this slogan that Russian combatants “liberated” me and my family from our own country. We were forced to leave for Kyiv. But we knew of course that the Russians would not stop there. And so it happened. After February 24, I made a firm decision never again to publish a single text in Russian. I do not want to be understood by those beasts who are murdering Ukrainian children. I have nothing to say to them. A language has not been invented in which it is possible to talk with someone who has come to your house to murder you, to murder your wife and your child, to destroy your home and scorch your land. And I have no desire to contribute any longer, even if indirectly, to Ukrainian literature in the Russian language. If it does continue, then let it continue without my participation.
Even as I could at least theoretically entertain the idea of never ever saying or writing a word of German again, of course it's inconceivable for such a situation to occur (why am I writing "of course"?). Reading Rafeyenko's words made me think about the amount of heartbreak this writer must have endured, severing ties to a language he had worked in (and spoken) for a long time.
As photographers, we don't have these kinds of connections to our tools, don't we? Our tools are external, and we choose them. They either are machines or are based on machines (let's call a computer a machine). But language is something entirely different. At least one language chooses you before you are able to make decisions for yourself. You are immersed in it through your parents (if you're lucky, there's more than one language). As a writer, you spend so much time thinking about and working with language. It changes from being a tool to being your tool as you adapt it to your use.
Speaking of tools, RIP Instagram. Even as the company appears to have backed off its latest "update" (which effectively cut off photography), it has long been clear that the site is not a good tool for photographers. It hasn't been for a long time. I used the opportunity to write about how we photographers engage with our tools: usually not very well. More often than not, we work for our tools -- instead of having them work for us.
Feel free to share your experiences with photography tools: how do you decide which ones to use? By this I don't necessarily mean "resolution" or "Megapixels" or any such stuff. After all, picking the camera with the highest number of Megapixels could be a bad choice for your practice, right? So what are your experiences with picking tools? Have you decided to change a tool once you realized it didn't work for you? It can be a camera, some software, an app... Whatever you can think of. I'd be happy to share your experiences in the next email.
Thank you for reading!
-- Jörg