between the skin and sea

One of the most interesting properties of photography is that the more you attempt to force meaning onto it, the less it will conform to it. Despite its technical nature and apparent degree of descriptiveness, photography works best when someone understands its limitations and gently works with and around them.

In effect, photography is most effective when it’s used to create what in the German language is called a Stimmungsbild, a term that photographically speaking does not make sense. Stimmung translates as mood or atmosphere: it’s that which photographs expressly are unable to depict.

Through combining them in such a fashion that their individual voices assemble like a choir, a collection of photographs can forcefully evoke an atmosphere in ways that rival (possibly surpass) other forms of art.

One of the reasons why description is such an impotent approach to photography criticism is based on the above: if you describe photographs, you do not in fact either engage with them or acknowledge what they do. If I went through Katrin Koenning‘s between the skin and sea and described the photographs, you would still have no idea what the book actually does.

In fact, I don’t envy the poor person at the publisher who had to describe the book. The best description of this book (and many others) would be: “just have a look at the book with an open heart, and you will see!” Obviously, you can’t sell books that way; but then it’s not clear to me whether talking about “tales of entanglement, relation, connection and intimacy” that “unfold” does the job.

That’s the thing with photographs: they need you to see; a Stimmungsbild defies language. Or rather, it defies description. Someone more gifted than me who knows how to use language to create a Stimmungsbild could conceivably assemble something that would approach between the skin and sea. But that would then be its own piece of art, one that evokes the mood of this book using text.

How does one go about living in difficult times? Well, I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows (the fascists pretend that they know, but they only know a lot less than the rest of us: strength isn’t strength if it denies its own weakness). I haven’t spoken with Katrin about this, but I am certain that she would tell me that she doesn’t know, either.

At least that’s what I’m gathering from the book, because as far as I can see it was made from exactly that position: from finding oneself adrift in a sea of impossibility and uncertainty, the sea that stared washing over all of us maybe a decade ago (was it then?) and that since has not receded.

And I don’t mean that literal sea, some of which can be found in Katrin’s pictures, even though, yes, if you really want to by all means think about that sea as well (the amount of literalness in the world of photography has been driving me crazy for a while).

If you think about it, you could view the recent pandemic as a metaphor that became its own, real-life threat. Appearing seemingly out of nowhere, it put an initially puzzling danger into the air, and it pitted us against each other: you might be sick or at least might get me sick, and I don’t want to die from it.

I don’t think that it’s fair to say that the pandemic brought out the worst in us; the fascists had already done as much. But it amplified what had been in the air (not literally); and I am convinced that the fascists reacted so forcefully against our collective efforts to bring it under control because they sensed the disease’s potential.

between the skin and sea is filled with a dread that cannot truly be named because it’s more than what was produced by the pandemic. It’s difficult to remember this now, but there also was a real beauty to the many manifestations of solidarity that emerged at the time (at least until we all got so tired of living under that particular Damocles sword).

The book contains frequent allusions to those as well, to the reaching out and being with each other, realizing that the physical distance we would have to observe only served to remind us of the closeness we felt with each other.

This is the kind of book that could only have been made by a mature artist, someone who has been in this world for a while to know about her own and other people’s vulnerabilities, someone who has had her fair share of suffering and disappointments, someone who knows how to pull a widely felt sentiment out of her innermost emotional core.

It’s a book that is mostly inhabited by innocent creatures — children and animals, and the few adult figures seem lost and uncertain how to proceed. (By the way, really good photographers don’t shy away from making really good photographs of cats and putting them into their books.)

If by now you don’t want to race to get a copy of between the skin and sea, it’s unlikely that anything else I might write will sway you. That can’t be the idea of criticism anyway, to sway people. After all, that’s not the idea of art, either.

Art isn’t trying to convince people of something in the way that you might get convinced to eat broccoli because even though you hate the taste you know that it’s good for you.

Instead, art has to remind us of what little shards of shared humanity we have left. Photographs ask us to see — and then to feel (or rather the good ones do; the others are still only pictures of sticks and stones that no highfalutin statement can salvage).

And this is the age where we have to force ourselves to look, to see, to feel — and then to act. For things to get better, we will have to start out at the smallest scales — a little kindness to a stranger maybe, or a smile.

Highly recommended.

between the skin and sea; photographs by Katrin Koennings; 188 pages; Chose Commune; 2024

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The Auschwitz Memorial uses its social-media presence by highlighting the lives and fates of some of the people who went through the camp. Where available, there is a photograph, and there are a few short sentences about that person’s fate.

“15 August 1928 | A Polish girl, Czesława Kwoka, was born in Wólka Złojecka,” an entry might read, “In #Auschwitz fro [sic!] 13 December 1942 (expelled by the Germans during pacification of Zamość Region.) No. 26947 She was murdered with a phenol heart injection on 12 March 1943.” (not linking to this particular entry, given the Memorial ceased its presence on the particular social-media platform that has since turned into a haven for Nazis and other assorted far-right figures).

The photographs play a crucial role. Typically, they look like family photographs or studio portraits. For that brief moment that a viewer spends with one of these entries, the face of someone who lost their life a long time ago because of unimaginable cruelty is yanked back from the abyss of forgetting.

And there are a name and some dates. I often find myself calculating how long a person lasted at Auschwitz. The typically short duration of their stay reflects the cruelty of the fate that awaited those who had to enter that particular hell on earth.

But it’s the photographs that are crucial. Photography theorists typically evoke Roland Barthes’ idea of the punctum, some subjectively felt detail in a photograph that moves or touches a viewer. Do ordinary people look at photographs that way? I’m not sure.

Either way, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to see the photographs themselves in the Auschwitz Memorial’s social-media posts as the punctum. It is their continued presence — and not some detail — that demonstrates how photography is such a powerful medium.

For some of the Auschwitz victims, there are identification photographs taken at the camp. Underneath the words describing Czesława‘s life and fate, there is such a triplet. The photographs were taken by Wilhelm Brasse, who was Polish and traced his German sounding name back to Austrian settlers.

Brasse spent four years in concentration camps, most of them in Auschwitz. He was in luck: he knew how to take photographs, and he was able to speak German. He was of use for the camp’s administrators, so they gave him a job as a photographer and better food and accommodations than the vast majority of the other inmates.

Brasse ended up taking thousands of photographs of newly arrived prisoners, some of which miraculously survived the war. Czesława‘s photographs are among them. When Brasse died in 2012, the New York Times ran an obituary. “Three of the photographs,” writes Lily Tuck in the Author’s Note of The Rest Is Memory, “were of Czesława Kwoka, a fourteen-year-old Polish Catholic girl. I cut out the photos and kept them.”

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism,” Theodor Adorno wrote in 1949, as if four years after the end of World War 2 the world was waiting for another grandiose pronouncement from a German. Granted, Adorno had been an émigré. Still…

But the man had a point: what role might poetry or any form of art really play after the Zivilisationsbruch that was Auschwitz and the system of extermination camps? Would art be able to deal with something like Auschwitz? If yes, what might this look or sound or feel like?

The Rest Is Memory is a relatively short book that is billed as a novel. I don’t know whether this is the best way to describe the text. Instead of a longer, detailed story, possibly laid out in chapters, this book offers short, clipped texts, some of them factual (there are footnotes). But a discussion over whether this is a novel (or what kind of novel) would unnecessarily divert attention away from Lily Tuck’s achievement.

“This is a work of fiction based on fact,” Tuck writes in her Author’s Note, “for Czesława, I imagined a pretty orange hen named Kinga, a creamy karpatka, a Bible with a white leather cover and a game of jack, Anton with the nice laugh, and snow.”

There’s something in the simultaneous sparseness and specificity of these imagined facts that manages to fill out the whole — without doing it explicitly. Too little is known of this Polish girl — other than her face and the startled and frightened look on it when faced with Brasse’s camera, about three months before she was murdered.

Larger parts of the devastation that German soldiers and civilians caused in Poland during World War 2 are still unacknowledged in contemporary Germany. In light of recent events — the country’s ruling class shamefully weaponizing the accusation of antisemitism to target dissenters (among them many Jews) — it’s not difficult to come to the conclusion that the country of my birth has learned only one thing from our shared past: how to pretend to have learned something without actually accepting any of the lessons.

There should be millions of individual books such as this one, one each for every person who lost their life in the Nazi’s death machinery. But who would find the time to write all of these, let alone read them? In any case, the presence of a single book is more searing than what millions of them could achieve, in particular since Tuck leaves so much unimagined.

It took me three days to read the 114 pages, simply because I ended up being emotionally so exhausted after spending time with the book. And of course, there’s Czesława‘s face on the cover. Maybe I am imagining this. But her eyes are directed at something above a viewer’s eye level, which makes me feel as if she is aware of something I am not.

Walter Benjamin famously wrote about Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus: “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.”

But that is not what Czesława sees with her eyes. In front of her is another catastrophe (that, granted, will soon turn into Benjamin’s), the one of the brutal present, a catastrophe that in many different forms people are experiencing every day on this planet, whether in the trenches in Ukraine, the ruins of Gaza, or elsewhere.

Imagining, as Tusk has done here, can form a part of not forgetting. Imagining an unknowable detail of something much larger that must not be forgotten.

Photographs can play a huge role in this endeavor, not necessarily only as documents (such as the photographs taken inside the Auschwitz camp) but also as magical entities that can nudge us to imagine: who was that person? What might she have felt?

Because we will want to imagine. We need to look, and we need to imagine. If we can’t imagine a stranger’s cruel fate, if we cannot attempt to feel their pain — what hope is there left that we might build a better future?

Highly recommended.

Lily Tuck: The Rest Is Memory; 128 pages; Liveright; 2024

We’re currently witnessing the death throes of social media. As is always the case when something monstrous dies, it’s not a pretty sight. None of it would matter much, though, if social media did not have the power to drag along liberal democracy into the abyss.

As photographers, we’re all citizens of some country. Thus, at least in theory we have an interest in improving our general life conditions. I have opinions about what this might look like both for our work and for how we approach social media. However, here I want to focus on social media not as the symptom of a larger disease (which they still are) but as a tool (which they were).

This morning, I was thinking that there probably are photographers who have never known a world in which social media do not play a large role. But there was such a world, and it existed not that long ago. In fact, you don’t have to go back that far in time to arrive in a world in which it was very difficult to find meaningful information and/or resources about photography online.

For sure, I do not want to glamourize the pre-social-media online world. My first exposure to the internet was in the early 1990s. Already then it was relatively easy to find the kinds of things that have now been vastly amplified by social media: trolling, bad-faith arguments for their own sakes, etc. As far as I can tell, the competition between people’s best interests and their worst has always existed online.

Furthermore, as I already noted unlike now it was very difficult to easily come across photography online for a long time. When I first began developing this website/blog, I started out with the idea of creating a resource for people that would make looking for photography a lot easier. Where photography existed online, it was dispersed, and finding it was difficult and cumbersome.

At some stage into what was then Conscientious I disabled comments.

There have always been a lot of noises from bad-faith actors about “free speech”. I disabled comments mostly because I realized that I would not be able to leave them unattended, given the increasing flood of trolling and bot-controlled spam. However, I did not have the time to do so. I also decided that that was not the best investment of my time. Instead of moderating comments, I wanted to spend my energies on creating things.

Initially, social media seemed like a great tool for photographers because they solved one of the big problems with blogs: they turbo-charged the advantages of blogging while at least initially removing some of its drawbacks. Creating a site to share and entering a community was a lot easier and much more convenient. That’s why blogging faded into the background very quickly.

The new tool seemed just so much more convenient and so much easier than the old one. If I had not invested so much time into my blog I might have jumped to social media as well. But there was one aspect I did not trust: you had (and have) no control over the general environment you’re in.

I had seen this basic fact create massive problems before, and I did not want it to create problems for me. That’s why the main focus of my work has always been this site, even as I have been active on a variety of different social-media platforms.

It’s difficult to remember or imagine this now, but social-media platforms used to be fun. I personally always thought that Facebook was creepy, so after some brief tests I stayed away from it. Twitter was a lot of fun for a while, and so was Instagram. You could use Twitter to see people share the wittiest short pieces of text, and on Instagram you would find a stream of photographs (and only that: no ads, no recycled video clips).

While this was more than enough for its users, it was not enough for the people in the background, the people running the sites. The form of capitalism we live under decrees that only growth is good. Consequently, social-media platforms had to grow. How do you grow something that is fun? Why, of course you make it more fun!

The only problem with this idea is that the people who had set up the platforms were (and still are) intellectually and morally not very well suited for this endeavour. They embraced the simplest idea they could find — let’s give people more of what we think they want, and they ran with it: enter what we now call “the algorithm”.

“Engagement” was amplified, which only meant: trolls and bad-faith actors were given an advantage. It didn’t matter what or how people engaged. If you were a quiet, thoughtful voice: tough luck! Social Media sites became the equivalent of ancient Rome’s Circus Maximus. Foreign bad-faith actors (Vladimir Putin and others) immediately stepped in because they knew they could massively harm the liberal democracies they despise so much.

Calling people’s decisions “the algorithm” was a nifty choice. It makes it seem as if there were an independent sentient entity behind what is happening, instead of the cold, hard decisions by a group of mostly white males with their incredibly narrow mindsets.

But you want to keep this in mind (especially now that the snake oil of “AI” has arrived): the algorithm is meaningless. It’s a set of rules a computer operates with. The only thing that matters are the rules and in particular the people who set them.

Making sure that people had “more fun” resulted in, for example, Instagram turning from what was a convenient and fun photo-sharing platform into whatever it is now. I don’t even know how to describe it other than maybe an advertizing platform that consists of previously incompatible pieces created by plundering other platform’s ideas.

It’s not even so much the fact that Instagram is overrun by things most photographers did not really sign up for. It’s that what you get to see and what is not allowed to be seen is decreed by those people in Silicon Valley.

And there has been yet another change. Wearing a watch that retails at $895,500, Mark Zuckerberg, the man who started out with a website to rate women’s bodies (to later enable genocide at least once) announced that there would be changes to the rules yet again. In light of the outcome of the 2024 US election, Zuckerberg announced that he would follow Elon Musk’s lead.

Musk, a far-right troll who happens to be the richest person in the world, had earlier bought Twitter and quickly transformed it into the equivalent of a Nazi bar (the site is now called “X”, probably because using a swastika would have been too on the nose).

As I noted, bad faith and trolling have always existed on the internet. But these man-children have made it one of the drivers of their business models (“engagement”). Their bet is that people will not quit their platforms because they have become indispensable.

Of course, nobody is actually forced to use any of those platforms. Much like a lot of people, I quit Twitter shortly after Musk’s takeover. I’m currently thinking about what to do with Instagram.

So what do you do with Instagram? As far as I’m concerned, the site has long lost its utility as a photography sharing platform. It has become very rare for me to discover anything new or interesting there even though I spend way too much time scrolling there (I mostly look for content around learning Japanese, and I will happily admit that I love looking at animal videos).

But Instagram is the only game in town. Or rather, it feels as if it were. The reality is that while there are a number of photo-sharing apps, only Instagram comes with a legacy community. In almost all of the conversations I have either been a part of or that I have seen, that factor has popped up in some form or another: “XXX looks great, but there’s not much happening there.” (Replace “XXX” with whatever photograph app you can think of.)

Simply speaking, looking for a replacement for Instagram but expecting that it operates at the level of that site simply is unrealistic. That’s not how the world works. You can build up things pretty quickly, though. Just have a look at how quickly Bluesky has replaced Twitter for a lot of people.

It might just come to down to what G. Willow Wilson observed there the other day: “I honestly think we are experiencing the end of the internet as those of us born in the 20th c understand it. Smaller, siloed communities like discord servers and newsletters will persist, but the idea of the global public square is dead, as is “the information superhighway.” VCs killed it.”

Unlike the time when social media started, I believe this presents an opportunity for photographers today. Creating a new community on a different platform will take time and effort. In fact, it’s not even clear to me that focusing on only one app is the approach to follow: maybe app XXX works better for sharing work, while app YYY might be better for people who want to engage in conversations?

The opportunity presented by the agonizing demise of Instagram for photographers is the following: the creation of something new can now be done knowing all the things that went wrong with Instagram.

You can see exactly that process happening for the Twitter alternatives. It’s not an easy process, but as far as I can tell, people are a lot more mindful of what they want and need — and what they don’t want and need.

Consequently, I believe that photographers’ interests in photo-sharing apps should go beyond having something that (unlike Instagram) works for them. Instead, photographers need to spend a little bit of time thinking about what exactly they need. Those photo-sharing apps are tools. You base the tool you pick on what you need it for.

Furthermore, also be mindful of all the photographers who were not active on Instagram because of the incessant censorship there. They’re predominantly women, people of colour, members of the LGBTQI community. If you feel bad about losing what you built, simply try to imagine being in their position: they have always been in that position. Being able to build something new that includes what the man-children excluded is a huge opportunity for all of us.

I don’t know about you, but being on Instagram and seeing it distort itself into the monster that’s detrimental to everybody’s mental health has been excruciating. At the same time, the death of Instagram should not be seen as the death of the underlying idea. Trust me, I don’t think we want to go back to the world that existed twenty years ago, where it was so much harder to interact with other photographers and their work.

And without community, we will not be able to deal with the many challenges we’re facing today. Without community and solidarity, we will be passive spectators to the destruction of liberal democracies by the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Even if you feel that you need a haven from all that craziness, making yourself a member of a community indirectly is contributing to the very larger good that is now being plundered by the oligarchs.

The promise of the social internet has been betrayed; but it has not disappeared. The promise of an internet that is uniquely designed to use photography has been distorted; but it also has not disappeared.

The death of Instagram is not the death of photo sharing online. It’s merely the death of a particular, heavily distorted form.

It is upon us individually to make good use of what still is available and to create something meaningful from it. On the internet, this has happened before, and it can happen again.

(I will share some more specific ideas on some of my past experiences and how they influence how I will move forward on my Patreon.)

I have never been particularly interested in street photography. Of course, I am aware of its dominant past practitioners. Their work speaks of a certain moment in time (and space: mostly New York City) that has long passed. I find it difficult to ignore the very strong whiff of machismo around those photographs.

Street photography today mostly reminds me of what reenactors do: instead of donning some old uniform to re-stage some battle (let’s not get into the baggage of that), you put a camera around your neck and re-imagine the glory days of the photographic discipline you admire so much. It’s fine if that’s your thing: who am I to argue with that?

Except that today, many (most?) people do not want to be photographed without their consent. The US defense of the public space in which you operate and that gives you the legal right to do so does not address the ethics of it. The European Union has stricter laws and protects its citizens’ right of their own pictures. There are legal exceptions for artists (that differ from country to country), but the ethical aspect remains.

Of course, what defines an artist is not that they do what they want to do. The defining criterion of a real artist is that they create something around and against the restrictions they find themselves facing.

The following is a relevant and important question not just for street photographers but for many other practitioners as well: how do you create a form of whatever type of photography you’re using that does not merely reproduce simulacra of bygone eras? The idea is not to create the new for the sake of the new (in a neoliberal, consumerist sense), but instead to create the new for the sake of it speaking to the moment artists are finding themselves in?

Maybe it is no surprise that one possible answer for street photography would come from Japan. Tokyo, after all, has been undergoing changes since, say, the 1960s that are a lot more massive than the ones you’d be able to observe in New York City, both in terms of what the built environment looks like and the overall embrace of technology and public investments into civic infrastructure. At the same time, consumerism plays an outsized role in both cities.

What might a street photography look like that accounts for all of these massive changes and that brings the genre into our own time? If you’re curious, Fumitsugu Takedo will show you in his book Ambience Decay (the artist’s website is almost entirely in Japanese, but there is enough English text for a viewer to understand what’s going on).

I can’t tell whether the book was produced using a mass-market printing service (some equivalent of Mixam). For most photography applications that I can think of such services don’t do a particular good job. But here, the production matches the world presented in the book really well. I have seen my fair share of books produced this way, and I’ve always come across being underwhelmed. Not here.

One of the defining aspects of Ambience Decay is not only an embrace of different types of images and image sources, it’s also its rejection of old-fashioned ideas of image quality. By that I mean that blown up details of digital images (that might or might not betray compression artifacts, screen-raster details, or gaudy overly processed colours) exist next straight photographs of a mostly completely helter-skelter kind.

Looking through the book, I was immediately transported back to the busiest and most crowded sections of Tokyo, with its throngs of people on their ways to whatever destinations they were heading towards. The whole book is filled with the city’s nervous energy.

Interestingly, the most prominent aspects of the book are hands, many of them holding and/or operating smartphones. It’s the hands of people encountered in the streets. There barely are any depictions of them following the tradition of the genre. Instead, they’re lost in the urban jumble around them, cut off through the cameras’ framings, obscured by ubiquitous reflections created by store windows and the displays of advertizing.

If traditional street photography portrayed life through its skillfully seen temporary arrangements of individuals navigating their city, here the city has overcome its own inhabitants. Whatever individuality the people in the photographs might have within the confines of their own homes, there is nothing left in an environment that not only culturally negates the individual: capitalism, despite its hollow promise of iThis and iThat, does so as well.

We have all become expendable, and nothing but the content of our bank accounts is of interest.

I find it unlikely that the practitioners of traditional street photography will recognize a contemporary version of their beloved genre in this book (I could be mistaken). But for the rest of us, Ambience Decay demonstrates that as a medium, photography can be driven forward and brought into this moment — not through snake-oil style offerings coming out of Silicon Valley (such as “AI” image making) but through the ingenuity of its practitioners.

There is a lesson here, even though I do not want to overstate the case: if you believe that you will create good art by seeing which prompts will deliver you the best images, you might be operating under the wrongest possible definition of what art is. Operating within the confines of a box is not what makes good art (and that’s not even getting into the many deeply problematic aspects of “AI” image making, such as the plundering of visual resources and the many biases against people who are not straight and white).

Good art that pushes the boundaries and that drives its own media forward is made by operating outside of the confines of the boxes, whether the ones created by the technology available to you or the ones created by whatever society you might find yourself living in.

To reinvent the moribund genre of street photography by bringing it into our time, both in terms of image making and looking, is no mean feat. But here it is, Fumitsugu Takedo‘s new street photography, produced in sterile consumerist Tokyo.

Highly recommended.

Ambience Decay; images by Fumitsugu Takedo; 120 pages; Photobook Daydream Editions, 2024

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