We Are The Frog
It has been a while. I had promised myself that I would send out an email when I was ready to do so, regardless of how much (or little) time had passed since the previous one. These past weeks, I have been preoccupied with a number of things to an extent that left me with little additional energy. There was a birthday to deal with, the first one to have me realise the gap between my aspirations and what I might have actually achieved. In fact, I had been wondering whether instead of "gap" I should not instead use the word "abyss." I'll spare you the details, but you might be able to imagine how this put a damper on things.
Obviously, there now also is the largest war in Europe since World War 2, which has shaken me quite a bit. I don't intend to write about it here (there are some words over at CPhMag.com).
The following is assembled from a number of thoughts that have been on my mind and that somehow seemed to connect in that strange way that the brain produces. Writing it down in short segments and then fusing them has given me some insight into something, the larger shape of which might only become clear later.
I hope you will enjoy reading it.
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You probably heard of the idea that a frog can be boiled alive if the temperature increases gradually. The frog, the tale goes, never realises what’s going on until it’s too late. I looked this up quite some time ago to find that this does not work. Just in case you’re wondering: It’s not that I wanted to boil a frog (please don't try this yourself). I wanted to find out the truth about this.
But there is something frog-like about us humans. As long as things change slowly, we won’t realise until it’s either too late or until things have changed massively. I noticed this when seeing graphs that showed the amount of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as a function of time (years passing). The other day, I saw a similar graph, this one showing the amount of plastic produced every year.
In an obvious sense, there is a huge difference between carbon dioxide and plastic. The former is a gas that we can’t see or smell. The latter is stuff that is around us as we buy it. Granted, most people don’t go out to buy plastic. You might buy a bottle of something or some object that might contain and/or consist of plastic. But naively I always imagined that I would notice the increase in plastic.
The reality is that I didn’t. I didn’t notice the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and at no stage in my life did I think “Boy, there’s more and more plastic out there” (even as I occasionally might have griped about something being made from it). What I do notice is that winters are now noticeably milder, while summers tend to have a lot more hot days than when I grew up. Somehow, all bottles are now made of plastic in a way that the occasional glass bottle feels strange.
A little while ago, I had to have my driver’s license renewed. This time, I opted for a new type of ID, for which I had to have a new picture taken. Ignoring the fact that the only photographic aspect of this was the involvement of what looked like a rather cheap digital camera (which was placed way too low given my height, resulting in what’s possibly not the most flattering angle), I ended up with a new snapshot of my life (at least the way the government sees me).
Once my new ID arrived in the mail I placed it next to the old one. Up until that moment, I had taken for granted that the person shown in the old one was me. And yes, it was. The new one told me: here I am, ten years later. For the next ten years, I will now think of myself as the guy who waited too long to get a haircut (a “lovely” reminder of the pandemic). That aside, though, I saw myself aged. Aged, not ageing. One would have to be a Noah Kalina to see oneself ageing, and even then, it would only happen in retrospect.
This is the weird aspect of photography, at least for me. It’s a little bit like what I noticed with volume buttons on electronic devices. Unlike in the old days where, say, an amplifier had a wheel that you could gradually turn, there now are discreet points. You can go to 5 (whatever that means) to 6, but you can’t go to 5.5 or 5.7. Have you ever noticed the following? At some stage, the following happens. There is a point where some setting, let’s say 7, isn’t loud enough. But when you turn to 8 it’s too loud?
I think that in photography, you can observe the same effect. Ignoring dramatic changes in very specific objects — you could certainly tell photographs from New York City before and after 9/11, it’s very hard to see changes unless they are rather drastic. And then what looked perfectly normal suddenly look strange, looks uncanny.
I remember looking at an older book by Michael Schmidt (his Wedding book, Wedding here being a district in Berlin), thinking that on the one had what he had photographed looked perfectly recognisable to me — the West Germany I had grown up in. On the other hand, it was a different world. It looked like the past, but a past that I have a part in. I don’t mean this literally. I grew up in a different part of West Germany (technically speaking, West Berlin was not part of West Germany, but you can’t see that in the pictures). But I grew up in the same West Germany in the same way that for sure I didn’t grow up in East Germany or wherever else.
In photographs, the past can be a place that is incredibly familiar and unbelievably alien at the same time.
This makes looking at photographs that were produced mimicking an older technology somewhat strange. For me, the essence of a photograph taken with, say, an SX-70 camera is not based on its aesthetic. This is not to say that I have a problem with either digital simulations or using the new SX-70 type pictures that are intended to reproduce the old look. Not at all. For a while, I used an app on my phone that would create such images.
The main difference is that I am familiar with the world that existed when SX-70 cameras were common. A picture from that time misses the quality that I described above: the uncanniness is missing, leaving me with an aesthetic experience only. Undoubtedly, someone who was born twenty or thirty years later than me will have a completely different experience with this. I mean, the 1980s now are seen as cool, which as someone having to live through them leaves me aghast. You get the 1980s aethestic without the time's enormous dread.
I don’t know what this leaves me with other than the fact that somehow, there is a lot more to photography than the materials or the aesthetic. For a lack of a better description, there is the lived experience. You either have it, or you don’t. If you don’t have it, that’s not necessarily a loss. In fact, photographers who have gone to war have spoken very forcefully about the fact that their photographs don’t even come close to the experience. Even as wars might be extreme cases, I do think that the overall principle extends to most (all?) other circumstances.
In some ways, this idea disturbs me, because one of the reasons why I love looking at photographs is because it allows me to partake in an experience. But this partaking will always be limited for all kinds of reasons, which also means that looking at photographs might have more in common with looking into a mirror than we realise.
Now I’ve come from boiling frogs all the way to looking into a mirror, and I still feel that this train of thoughts isn't done, yet. But for now it is.
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As always thank you for reading, and stay safe and well!
-- Jörg