We tend to not think about how our thoughts are poison
Welcome to the 99th 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 think a lot of us are experiencing mental stress of some kind these days (for reasons that I probably do not have to explain). For some, it might be worse than for others. Based on my own experiences (I have long struggled with periods of depression) I can only encourage you to take care of your own mental needs should they arise, and certainly if you feel overwhelmed.
It’s Okay to Not Be Okay sounds like a somewhat trite phrase, but there is a lot of wisdom (some of it medical) behind it. It's a bit like they tell you during the safety instructions on a plane: take care of your own oxygen mask (needs) first before you try helping others.
Another thing I wanted to say before I get to the regular programming is the following. If you know someone who you know is in need of support, or if you know someone who you might suspect is in need of support (maybe because they're Jewish or Palestinian), reach out to them and ask them gently if they're OK. Listen to them. These days, there's a lot of shouting -- and very listening.
Social media make us feel as if we were deeply connected. But in reality, I don't think that that's what social media do. Social media connect us in some specific ways, while disconnecting us in many others, the latter of which might be a lot more important to our mental health than the former.
Speaking of social media, the other day I thought I would look into what Instagram calls my "engagement". I was not particularly interested in how many people had commented or "liked" my posts. I was interested in something more basic: how many people did actually see these posts?
For the last 10 posts, the numbers are (as of right now, 12 October 2023, 15:00EST) 1,799, 485, 1,110, 2,204, 2,099, 2,704, 1,301, 619, 346, and 775. According to Instagram, I now have 10,000 "followers" (or more than that, it says 10k, and I'm too lazy to check the real number). This means that in the best case, 27% of the people who had decided they wanted to see my posts saw them. In the worst case, I got 6%.
There were two reasons why I looked at this. First, I had heard about this before. But I had never checked. Second, I was speaking with a book publisher about doing a photobook (The Long Shadow) with them, and the issue of crowdfunding came up. With 10k "followers" such crowdfunding would be a lot easier if each one of these people actually saw my posts than in reality, where between 6% and 27% do. Obviously, there are bots among my "followers" and obviously, somehow some of my posts might reach more people if I'm lucky or if I'm spending a lot of time on trying to game the algorithm.
What I'm after here is something I wrote about before: we're at the mercy of companies like Facebook ("Meta" -- haha) and we have happily made ourselves dependent on them. My case isn't even quite as difficult as many other photographers'. My work is political, but my own photographs typically do not show the politics openly. In contrast, many photographers are heavily censored by Instagram, or they constantly have to self-censor themselves so they have a chance to reach the 25% of all those people that want to see their work.
There was a really interesting conversation between Monica Lewinsky and Taylor Lorenz that you want to read.
Lorenz: The mental health [impact of social media] is getting worse: it’s harder, especially for young people, to separate who they are online from who they are as people, when so much of their identity is mediated by the internet and the feedback.
Lewinsky: It’s also built on things that are not real, like filters. The whole point of a filter is saying: I want to look better, which means you’re not good enough. We tend to not think about how our thoughts are poison, but they really can be.
Unrelated: you're probably familiar with traditional Japanese woodblock prints (in particular Hokusai's Great Wave). But the history of the medium actually is a lot more interesting than you might imagine. These images were not made to be high art, and they were not sold for a lot of money:
In today’s prices, buying an ukiyo-e was as easy and an inexpensive as buying a snack for less than 500 yen at a convenience store.
I probably shouldn't be saying this, but Sharaku's portraits -- mostly theater actors -- make me laugh.
The past few weeks, I have been thinking a lot about that: the value of art, which isn't necessarily correlated with its price (just look at Andreas Gursky's photographs).
I've also been thinking about the idea of "archival". In the world of photography, everything is supposed to be archival because... yes, why? Well, because gallerists and rich collectors prefer it that way. That way, the art you make will remains valuable long after you sold it -- and people can continue to benefit financially from it (fun fact: you won't see any of that money).
So what if you ditch this idea? Lisa Kereszi kindly sent me this article that's related to this: Tenderness and Rot, or Why I Should Be Allowed to Burn Down the Peabody by Elaina Foley. The piece is a wee bit art-academic, but it's easy to ignore the jargon. There's so much of value in the article!
This essay is my attempt to trace the flight path of that reimagining into world(s) where we can be gentler with one another. This is a dream of tenderness and accountability, of care and decay, of the kind of world that finds itself made more livable and loveable by embracing multiplicities.
A couple of AI pieces: First, Bellingcat looked into Bing's new AI image model (Dall.E 3) can and is being exploited by some of the worst people on the internet.
And this eye-opening article dives into the stereotypes peddled by Midjourney, another popular AI image model. There are lots of illustrations, so make sure to check this out.
What should one do with daguerreotypes of enslaved people? Photography is old enough for it to have produced such images. Some of them are in the collection of Harvard University. This long and detailed article by Jennifer Berry Hawes is an absolute must read.
I started with a photograph of the sky, so I might as well end with one. I take such a photograph almost every day, typically at the end of a day, with the sun setting and the phone facing that direction.
This concludes the 99th email from my mailing list. Please take care of yourself and of those around you!
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg