You're My Favourite Meme
This is not something I could remotely claim, and anyway, this email’s subject line might confuse you – until you watch this video. I don’t know how much time you spend with memes, let alone whether you think about them. Long story short, they’re a lot more interesting than you might imagine. Know Your Meme‘s website is a good place to start. Alternatively, browse through their videos.
I personally enjoy memes, even though with popular culture moving at an incredible pace for sure I miss a lot of the references or don’t know the characters. But deeper knowledge of the characters usually isn’t important. Instead, it’s all about what you can communicate with it. For example, for a workshop on image and text I created a meme to address photographers’ anxiety when it comes to working with text:
This obviously is more on the level of a dad joke. Still, it describes what I often run into accurately: photographers tend to be very worried that added text takes something away from their precious pictures (it usually won’t).
For a while now, I’ve been offering mentoring for photographers who need input of any kind. Maybe you have trouble developing your project. Maybe you feel stuck. Maybe you’ve run out of ideas. Maybe you simply need a second pair of eyes to look over your work. Maybe you want to make a book and don’t know how. Whatever it might be, if you feel you need input check out the broader idea on my website. Things are set up in three-months blocks – simply to be as flexible as possible.
If you have interest in this or have questions, be in touch! I always do a meet-and-greet style meeting with photographers where we learn about each other and figure out whether or how to proceed (that meeting is free of charge). At this stage, I can look back to having worked with photographers for over a decade, and there is a wide range of work that was produced by my students (some of which went on to be published or win awards or any of those nice things that can happen).
Mostly (but not fully) unrelated: Like I mentioned in a previous email, I’ve been re-reading The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski. It’s filled with anecdotes and bits of wisdom. Here’s something I thought I might share:
“Generally speaking, I think what characterizes an artist’s work is that he can talk about his community, but everyone listening to him thinks, ‘That’s my community.’ Everything we do lies between the personal and the collective. The artist sends out a sort of stimulus, and the viewer takes the image, appropriates it, and finishes the work. (…) The artwork necessarily only speaks about the self, but that’s of no importance: it becomes each person.” (p. 78)
This idea gets at the core of a problem that I’ve run into a lot with students. It’s usually expressed around the lines of: “this is interesting to me, but is it interesting to other people?” I think photography makes it difficult to deal with this, because of the way it works. You operate this little machine that extracts a picture from the world, your picture based on your ideas etc. How could this be interesting to other people if it’s not an obvious depiction of an easily shared sentiment? In that quote above, Boltanski explains how and why (assuming it’s done well, which is the obvious assumption in the background).
A little further down, there’s this following bit:
“I used to quote the expression ‘It’s not about discovering but about recognizing.’ Art isn’t there to make you discover things, but to make you recognize them. It’s through recognition that emotion is elicited” (p. 78; my emphasis)
For the longest time, I used to think the opposite was true, in part because I spent too much time with very traditional photography people. There is a pitfall to recognition: it’s easy to get stuck in what one is familiar with (because it feels good). But a real artist knows how to push against that, to try to get to the point of deeper recognition.
Lastly, and this again is somewhat unrelated, in my latest piece on CPhMag.com I write about a photographer’s attempt to take pictures in Liberia without producing the usual stereotypical fare. He does succeed in some (important) ways, and he fails in some other (equally important) ways. Give it a read!
With that, I’m going to conclude for today. I hope you’re well and safe, and as always thank you for reading!
– Jörg