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Welcome to the 96th 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.
The 100th edition of this newsletter is coming up. What am I going to do with/for it? Feel free to send in some ideas -- or maybe requests what you'd like to see!
The other day, I received an email that read in part:
Thank you for applying for the position of Obituary Writer . We appreciate the time and effort you have taken in completing your application.
We have carefully considered the merits of your application, and at this time, we unfortunately will not be moving forward with your candidacy.
To be honest, I had already forgotten that I applied for that particular job (I think I would have really enjoyed doing it, though).
The email left me with a few questions. They write that "at this time", they will not be moving forward with my candidacy. So they will move forward with it at another time?
Furthermore, shouldn't an email about an obituary-writer position read like an obituary -- and not like an HR email? What might that look like?
Or maybe it's more interesting the other way around: having obituaries read as if they were written by HR people. That might read as follows:
Thank you for buying this edition of our newspaper. We appreciate the time and effort you have taken in completing your purchase.
We have carefully considered the merits of the life of John Doe who passed away at the age of 96 in New York City. At this time, we unfortunately have come to the conclusion that Mr Doe's life fell short of our expectations, leaving us with nothing good to say about it.
We thus will not move forward with this obituary and wish his children Cindy (59) and Frank (57) success in their attempts to do better with their lives.
Obviously, you couldn't really do that. But there's something interesting about applying one type of language to a setting that employs a very different type of language.
If you think about it, there are parallels in the world of photography. Photographs can function very differently in different contexts. Switching from one context to the next can require a rather radical change in how one views photographs.
In fact, most people are able to perform such switches effortlessly. Most people -- except many photo professionals. My favourite example here is when someone claims that "all photography is a fiction" or (same thing, different wording) "all photographs lie". Next time you're going through passport control at some airport, try telling that to the person checking your passport. How might that go?
Berlin has a new photography museum -- if you're very generous with the general meaning of the word "museum". It's called Fotografiska, and they have a number of other venues, including Stockholm where it all started and New York City (NYC). This week, I was poking around online what I would find about the place and its owners. For now, I'm just going to share an article from when the NYC version opened:
Extremely swanky and incredibly mediocre, the new outpost at the intersection of Twenty-second Street and Park Avenue has six floors, 45,000 square feet, a gift shop, a café/bar, an event space, an elegant 115-seat restaurant, and even a few photographs.
And that's just the beginning of it. From what I've heard, the Berlin version isn't that different.
I started writing an article about the whole idea. But I managed to get stuck: do I really want to shoot this particular fish in this particular barrel? Then again, given how uncritical the world of photography responded to Pier 24, I might as well do it.
"Last week," Nicolas Kayser-Bril writes, "Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet published a bombshell. The story, titled “Spotify has become an ATM for criminals”, explains how gangs use the streaming platform to launder money. Cash from drug sales is converted to bitcoin. The cryptocurrency is then used to pay “click farms” that play songs from artists signed on record labels that are close to the gangs. Said labels receive a payout from Spotify, which is – I assume, this is not detailed in the piece – given back to the gangs as perfectly legal dividends."
The newsletter is well worth subscribing to. It covers stories from the world of algorithms, many of which I never hear about elsewhere. Or sometimes, they catch something really early before more people realize that there's a problem.
I've read this article by Nick Warr about Six Photos from W. G. Sebald’s Albums twice now, and I still can't tell whether it offers insight or is incredibly banal. Very strange.
Poland's far-right "interior minister, Mariusz Kamiński, told broadcaster TVP today that, although he also has not seen Green Border, “I can already say that it is an intellectually dishonest and morally shameful film… a presentation of Holland’s political views that has nothing to do with reality”." (story; my emphasis)
How he would know all that, given that by his own admission he has not seen the film... But I think to focus on that -- even though it's really funny -- misses the point of how neofascism works: it's a belief system that is not based on facts or reality.
Anyway, here's a photo of one of my cats that I took last night.
Meanwhile, over at CPhMag.com, I published a piece I had been working on for a while. It focuses on the Archive of Public Protests in Poland. I was curious what its makers thought of what they had achieved with their work these past three years. So I spoke with Rafał Milach and Karolina Gembara. If you haven't read my piece, check it out!
I used to listen to a lot of music. Now, I only do so every once in a while. Part of the reason is that there's not that much music around that excites me. But I discovered Julie, and I like what they've made so far. pushing daisies is their longest release, yet. It's a mix between a little Sonic Youth and some more My Bloody Valentine. Somehow, Julie make it sound very fresh and cool.
Well, there or rather: here it is, the ending of yet another email from my Mailing List. I hope it arrives in your inbox while you're doing something incredibly exciting.
As always thank you for reading!
-- Jörg