Sounds and Smells and More
You might have seen Sochi Singers by Rob Hornstra and Arnold van den Bruggen when it first came out. It's portraits of these Russian restaurant singers....
The Power of Words (and Art)
My last email generated a flurry of responses, and it was shared widely. As a consequence, this Mailing List's audience has grown quite a bit. If you've...
What It Takes
This is the time when photographers are getting their materials ready to apply for a spot in an MFA program. Having spoken with a large number of...
This Is The End (Of 2021)
It's the end of another year. Looking back, 2021 appears to have been mostly filled with disappointments for me: another year of the pandemic, no traveling...
Everything, All the Time, Everywhere (incl. Tendonitis)
Stuart Jeffries is the author of Grand Hotel Abyss, a book about the Frankfurt School that I started reading, yet never finished, in part because I had...
Eros + Massacre + Composition In Photography
A while ago, I signed up with a free streaming service. Free means: you don't have to pay money, but your programming is going to be interrupted by a period...
Kylo Ren Is The Vampire
Trying to learn Japanese entails watching the occasional movie (with subtitles). My Japanese isn't very good, but I can pick up basic conversations OK....
Heroes
Yesterday, I came across a cover of David Bowie's song Heroes, performed by Berlin-based Stereo Total. I'm not a Bowie fan, but I have been listening to...
Germanicisms and "Books For Snobs"
I don't recall how Alexander Wolff's Endpapers had made its way into my Reading List. But there it was, and since I needed to start a new book I thought it...
Mundane Halloween
During my childhood in Germany, Halloween wasn't an event. I'm not even sure I had heard about it (I can't remember). These days, things are different, as...
The Protest Is Visual
The Archive of Public Protests, photo Sebastian Cichocki I got talked into doing a (German language) podcast, which was recorded today. I don't remember how...
The Inland Sea
I had read Donald Richie's The Inland Sea before, and I had not liked it. That was years, maybe a decade ago. With my interest in Japan renewed, I thought I...
Two books
I don't read biographies very often. I have a hard time remembering names. When at their beginnings, there is talk about the family, possibly going back to...
Advice For The Young Artist
I've been involved in photoland for a while now, wearing a number of different hats. I'm am educator, a photographer, a writer. I'm listing these in...
"One hell of a photograph"
A little while ago, I decided to change the brand of toothpaste I was using. I had used the old brand for ages, but its price kept going up. At some stage,...
The Beauty of the Written Word
I finished reading Louis Menand's exhausting The Free World a little while ago. I gained much insight into the connections between a variety of artists,...
Don't be afraid to take that path (and look down every once in a while)
Even though I finished work on my new book, ideas are still swirling around in my head. This morning, I thought about how it all had started: the review I...
To Write Is To Be Sisyphus
It's hardly an original observation to compare the task of writing with Sisyphus'. Any writer will know to what extent they are Sisyphus, performing a...
Illusions and Other Afflictions
“Since the 2008 recession, profit-making from art as an asset class has only continued to consolidate within a remote strata of the ultra-wealthy.” If you...
Does GPT-3 Dream of Electric Artists?
Earlier this year, I received a copy of Stephan Keppel's Soft Copy Hard Copy in the mail. At around the same time, Nelis Franken, a student of mine, told me...