Tagesgedanken

“In a photograph a person’s history is buried as if under a layer of snow,” Siegfried Kracauer wrote in Photography, his essay about the medium and its relationship to memory (and history). His concern was mostly with photographs that originated in the past (however distant it might be), with one showing a grandmother as a prominent example.

What about photographs from just a few days ago, though? Can they be connected to memory? One would imagine that by construction, that cannot be the case. After all, memory mostly concerns itself with something that has long receded.

Memory typically becomes a lot more charged, emotionally or otherwise, if it deals with a past long gone. Yesterday, the day before, even last week: not enough time has passed for those points in time to have taken on special meaning (even if events were in fact quite special).

The other day, I came across a newspaper headline that stated that a child had died after what was now presumed to be arson in the town where I was born, Wilhelmshaven. The newspaper, a well-known left-wing daily, wrote that a fire had been started and that the intense smoke had left the child dead. The mother and her other children were being treated in a number of hospitals (some, possibly due to the seriousness of their injuries, rather far away).

The article noted that there had only been people with migratory backgrounds living in the apartment building in question. The family had somewhat recently arrived from West Africa, they had previously been subjected to racist abuse, and they were about to move to a new home.

Contemporary Germany being contemporary Germany, what should have made national news beyond that one newspaper did not — for all the reasons that you can easily imagine. Germany’s new government features a right-wing populist interior minister who is more concerned with trying to limit immigration than with dealing with crime against immigrants, and Germany’s media largely follow that model (the newspaper featuring the story is an exception).

There was a photograph of the building on top of the article (you can see it if you click on the link above). Somehow, the locale felt familiar to me. By now, I have not been back to Wilhelmshaven in over 25 years. I moved away when I went to university in 1989, and in the years after, I went back maybe once a year for a little while before stopping altogether. I have memories of the city, but they’re hazy.

Why then would a photography made in 2025 look so familiar to me? After all, the kind of building in the photograph could be found in many spots all over the city: a mixed-use building, with a store in the ground floor and three floors with apartments on top.

And yet, I was so convinced that I knew the place, the particular locale in question. At first, it was merely a guess. I looked more closely, and then it struck me: I knew the building to the right. I recognized it — after all these years — because of the tiles used to clad its second floor. This would have been the building that in the city’s main shopping area had the Woolworth department store in it when I lived in Wilhelmshaven.

But there was something strange about this: if my memory was correct, then the store that had burned would have been a toy store that also sold bicycles. I had gone to that store a lot (in part because they sold model trains), but I had never realized that there were apartments on top of the store.

Was all of that correct, though? It actually wasn’t difficult to find out. In the photograph, one can read the name of the store immediately to the left of the burnt building. A quick Google Maps search confirmed my hunch: yes, this is exactly the locale I had been thinking of. Reading through a few local newspaper article confirmed a detail: the name of the toy store (whose name, oddly, I still remembered).

The toy shop had closed some time ago, and there had been household refuse piled up in its entrance area. This is where the fire had been lit. How or why migrants were essentially housed on top of what sounds like a garbage dump to me was not explained in the papers.

Finding these details solved a question I was grappling with for a few hours: why was I so convinced that I was familiar with the location of the photograph? If you had asked me to describe the place, I would not have remembered much about the Woolworth, and I am certain that I would not have remembered that there were apartments on top of the toy store.

Somehow, the photograph had made me remember details that I had forgotten. Unlike in the case of the grandmother discussed in Siegfried Kracauer’s essay, even though my memories are part of a personal rather distant past, they brought me to a very specific moment, a very specific incident today — and all of that through a photograph taken, well, not today, but a few days ago.

If I had not found the details that confirmed what at first I thought I was guessing I would not have known what to make of the certainty that arose from looking at the photograph. I knew the locale — or rather, I knew the locale from the past, but I immediately felt connected to the present.

Instead of pulling us into a past (that might or might not have been remembered), photographs can also pull us out of our own past into a very real present, a present that through the visceral fact of a dead four-year old migrant child can make us feel ashamed of both the past and of our own inability for that present to arrive in the first place.

And therein, I’d argue, lies photography’s real power: it is one thing to come to a judgment of a past long gone, a past that will never change. It’s quite another to be reminded of one’s own inadequacy regarding preventing the past repeat itself today.

In 2020, my first photobook, Vaterland, was published, in which I looked at the re-emerging German nationalism and its many ugly side effects. At first, I wanted to dedicate the book to the victims of a right-wing killing spree. But the more I looked into far-right violence, the more names kept popping up.

Starting in the 1990s, dozens and dozens and dozens of people had been killed through far-right violence — many of them immigrants or people born to immigrant parents. A 2020 article documented at least 187 people murdered between 1990 and 2020 in Germany.

Just a few days after the Wilhelmshaven arson, Germany’s right-wing populist government decided to stop allowing families to join refugees and asylum seekers already living in the country. The government has its own priorities: taking care of those who are most vulnerable certainly isn’t one of them.

I suppose that if it had not been for that photograph in the article I first came across, I might not have been triggered by what just happened in Wilhelmshaven the way I did.

If many photos are stains that have long congealed and that have little or maybe only symbolic effect today, this photograph from Wilhelmshaven burns inside me, and I suspect that it will do so for a long, long time.

Whatever you want to say about the role of corporations in the ongoing war on liberal democracies (and there is a lot to be said, very little of it — if anything — complimentary), it also is a fact, yes: fact, that including cameras in so-called smartphones has done more to demonstrate photography’s full potential than anything that came before it, whether it was Louis Daguerre’s original process or the much touted Kodak Brownie.

Photography, in effect, was invented the wrong way around: first as an elitist tool that required skill and was subject too all kinds of restrictions. With time, those restrictions became looser and looser. But it took over 160 years before a camera function became embedded in a widely used communication tool: a telephone (at that stage finally untethered from its need for physical locations).

Photography had always been used to communicate something. But there was that aspect of control: who exactly controls how photographs are being made and where or how they are being shown?

Even as the Kodak Brownie with its famous slogan “You press the button, we do the rest” tried its hardest to have people forget about “the rest”, it was still there. Only the smartphone led to the situation where you press the little area on your phone’s screen that looks like a button, and there is your picture.

Now imagine that photography had not been invented in 1839. Imagine that photography had started out with the smartphone. In many ways, it’s an absurd exercise; but there is merit to it.

Imagine a world where everybody was able to make photographs and share them easily with others — and where, crucially, none of the thinking around them existed, the thinking that was created through the medium’s often torturous history.

In a nutshell, vast parts of the world of photography approach their medium not based on what it is able to do today, but only based on what it was able to do a long time ago.

The world of fine-art photography approaches the medium as if the world of salons, in which wealthy people showcase their wares, were still around. In modified form, that world has not disappeared. But the white-cube gallery with its clientele of oligarchs and other one-percenters has shorn all pretense of social settings and has instead embraced the sheer vulgarity of financial power.

As a consequence, the world of fine-art photography does not even remotely reflect or incorporate the excitement that exists around photography in the larger public sphere. “Theorists” instead bemoan the hoi polloi engaging in such exercises as taking selfies or presumably not enjoying whatever they’re engaged in when they photograph something (why people would consciously reduce their own enjoyment is never explained and how sharing one’s experience might contribute to one’s enjoyment is never considered).

The problem isn’t even so much that fine-art photography focuses only on the white cube or the photobook. I enjoy the latter a lot more than the former, but there is something to be said for a well-made exhibition. The problem is that there appears to be very little interest in exploring how photographs can be made to work beyond those two options.

In part, this has to do with one aspect the world of fine-art photography would rather not talk about: class. A lot of the observations made by Lee Cole about what it’s like to be a working-class writer in a prestigious MFA writing program could equally be made (possibly in slightly modified form) in the world of photography.

“While institutions—MFA programs, lit mags, publishing houses—have done much to include and elevate underrepresented groups on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation,” he writes, “they’ve done far less to include and elevate those from underrepresented class backgrounds.”

In the world of photography, underrepresented class backgrounds are included, but not in the fashion Cole has in mind. Underrepresented class backgrounds for sure are overrepresented as source material for photographs. “Source material” — that’s a hard term. But I think we have to be more honest about how most photographers think of the people they photograph.

The lines etched into someone’s face after they had to work two or three minimum-wage jobs to provide for their family make for great pictures. The actual person behind those lines, however, typically remains unseen, even as the one-percenters who might buy an oversized poster (“print”) tell themselves that, you see, they do care after all (they don’t).

Absent meaningful efforts for the inclusion and elevation of underrepresented class backgrounds, it’s probably no surprise that there is so little experimentation these days. Experimentation is not necessarily encouraged, and those most eager and/or willing to experiment — in part because of simple monetary restrictions — remain mostly excluded from both the community but also from the discourse around it.

One would have imagined that the various digital platforms that are used so widely would lead to an enlargement of ideas what can be done with photographs. But after some earlier experimentation with e-books and custom-made apps produced around specific bodies of work, my impression is that digital presentations have mostly become an afterthought again (if even that).

There are good reasons behind people pulling back from digital publishing, in particular the fact that for such products to reach a larger audience, they have to be accepted by the monopolies that control their dissemination. Google or Apple deciding whether an app can be sold through their “stores” is effectively a form of censorship.

Furthermore, actually producing an app or an elaborate website requires enormous expertise (and often money). Still, I can’t help but feel that while photobooks (which usually cost photographers a small fortune to make) are still being made in huge numbers, specialized websites for photography projects are not. To me, this feels like a huge wasted opportunity.

What all of this means is not only that there is considerable room to grow for fine-art photography. As a photographer, instead of spending endless time on figuring out which printer paper will give you the best results, you could start asking yourself why this even matters and whether there are not, in fact, better ways to spend your time: do you really want to focus so much on producing luxury products?

Furthermore, the general lack of experimentation provides a huge opening for all those who are eager to go this route. In a world where everybody is using the same techniques and approaches, the best way to set yourself apart is not only a focus on making the best possible version of whatever you want to make but also to make it in a fashion that feels true to yourself, the work, and the endless possibilities that exist and that for the most part remain unused.

I’d love nothing more for the world of fine-art photography to embrace more of the medium’s potential. Don’t get me wrong, I still love looking at photobooks. Still, I’ve arrived at a state where I find the overall lack of experimentation and the relentless focus on the same old outlets boring in a fashion that I can’t even describe with words any longer.

I see people out in the world having fun with photography, taking pictures with their phones, sharing them, sharing their excitement over them, appreciating the efforts made — and then I see the world of photography, a world almost entirely devoid of fun, excitement, and a willingness to expand a narrow and by now extremely tiresome approach to a medium that offers so much more.

That’s really depressing.

If you were to ask someone to describe a photographic portrait, they would probably say that it’s a picture that shows a person and that it was made with the intent to reveal something, however minute or large, about them. Inevitably (this is an easy guess), the photograph would have to include the person’s face (in particular their eyes).

Under most circumstances, this is a reasonable definition of a photographic portrait. It is, however, not necessarily the only one. After all, a photographer might find a way to reveal something about another person without showing their face. For example, Mitch Epstein photographed a dry-cleaned flag on a hanger that was part of his father’s possessions, and that said something about the father.

At the same time, it is when portraits are taken that both photographic power dynamics play out most openly.

In the world of photography, we have mostly embraced the notion that the person with the camera produces one picture as a portrait (even if a much larger number has been taken). That is a form of power. Even though you could argue that the photographer simply picks the best picture, there are many, many assumptions behind what “best” actually means.

In the world of physics, you can measure the point at which water freezes into ice: you will get a temperature that you can measure. But you cannot measure or determine in any even halfway serious way what exactly it is that makes one picture better than all the other variants (for photographers, this is a neat trick to conceal their power).

There is even more power at play in the larger societal sphere, given that even though on paper, all people have the same rights, the reality is that that is absolutely not the case. Women tend to have a lot less power than men, and people who for whatever reason do not fall into one of those two categories have even less power.

In the world of visuals (of which photography clearly is a part), power means the ability to control how others see you. People with power can determine how others can be seen, and they can also control how they are seen (that’s why there are so few in-depth photography projects about rich people — and so many about underprivileged people).

This is why typically photographers who are not male make vastly better portraits than their male counterparts: they know what it means to be seen without having the ability to fully control how they are seen.

Japan, one of the most advanced industrial nations, ranks among the least advanced ones as far as gender equality is concerned (“Referring to the 2024 Global Gender Gap Index released by the World Economic Forum, in which Japan ranked 118th out of 146 economies and last among the Group of Seven nations, the government acknowledged that its efforts remain clearly insufficient,” a story from a few days ago noted). That inequality is caked even into the country’s language: women typically express themselves differently than men (using different vocabulary — even for seemingly simple things such as when saying “I”).

Iwauko Murakami‘s Known Unknown intrigued me for all the reasons outlined above. The book features portraits made of women around the photographer’s age — her peers.

The afterword makes it clear that the project arose out of very personal circumstances — Murakami is from the region that was struck by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. After a while, the photographer realized the limits of photographing herself and reached out to friends she knew from art school.

The idea of the project — portraits in which the sitter’s face remains hidden — is simple. But I would argue that as is often the case with photography what the work ended up being about moved away from what it originated from.

The project is collaborative in the sense that without the permission of those in the photographs it could not have been made. Often, the scene is one of domesticity, and the photographer couldn’t just sneak into someone’s home and take their picture.

But in Japan, another person’s home isn’t the same as another person’s home in the US or Germany. In- and out-groups play a very strong role in Japanese societal life. A person’s home is their most cherished locale, the place of their most intimate in-group. If anything, this is the place where they can be truly themselves — and nobody else will see, nobody else will need to know.

Seen that way, trust must have played an enormous role during the making of Known Unknown: all of these young women allowed their friend into their homes and then posed for a picture as if she were in fact not present.

I’m not sure that all of the pictures end up reaching the same quality. In some, it seems clear that the person in front of the camera is trying her hardest to act as if she were on her own (resulting in the well known staged-narrative kind of feel).

But in others, that aspect has vanished. Magically, the viewer gets to see someone go about their typically rather mundane business within the comforts of their own home: you see a young Japanese woman being completely at ease with herself.

Any of these moments play out countless times in countless homes all over the world: people being people without pretense. But somehow, over the course of photography’s history, the medium has had such a hard time showing this, possibly because it is not “interesting”, possibly because it does not make for dramatic photographs… Who knows?

In her afterword, novelist Junko Takase speaks of the intimacy she senses in the photographs. And it really is true, these photographs are very intimate — without alluding to anything else.

Seen that way, the photographs are portraits. But they’re not necessarily only portraits of specific people (even though they are that, too). Instead they are a collective portrait of young Japanese women who were allowed to be — without judgment, without having to choose the right words or gestures.

Known Unknown; photographs by Iwauko Murakami; texts by Iwauko Murakami and Junko Takase; 68 pages; Fugensha; 2024

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When I first received Black Chronicles (edited by Renée Mussai) in the mail, and ever since, I have been wondering what those depicted therein had been thinking or feeling. It’s an impossible task, of course: we have no way of knowing. Photography has always allowed for that kind of speculation, and the temptation has always been to tie the clarity of the photographic picture to the presumed clarity of whatever results one arrives at as a viewer.

As I’ve said before, photography has been invented the wrong way around. Its earliest pictures were laden with artifice and restrictions, which has resulted in many misunderstandings of what a photograph is (or does) and what it might look like.

In this particular case, though, the fact that the photographs in the book were taken with the earliest available photographic materials and techniques is a huge gift: There is so much clarity and detail in the photographs that those portrayed appear to almost jump out from its pages.

And yet, one must resist the temptation to assume. So instead of coming to my own conclusions, I looked for the input of a man who shared a few crucial characteristics with those portrayed in Black Chronicles. Frederick Douglass had been born into slavery, escaped from it, and became one of the most important national figures the United States produced during the 19th Century.

We know what Douglass thought because we have his words (he was an orator and writer). But we also have incredibly detailed knowledge of what he looked like: He was the most photographed man of his time. Douglass had himself photographed around 160 times, because he grasped the importance of photography. He grasped the role photography could play for a society.

And he gave speeches about photography. The third speech in Picturing Frederick Douglass provides the clearest picture of his views. “A friend of mine,” he wrote, “once took my arm in New York, saying as he did so — ‘Frederick, I’m not ashamed to walk with you down Broadway.’ It never once occurred to him that I might for any reason be ashamed to walk with him down Broadway. He managed to remind me that mine was a despised and hated color — and his the orthodox and constitutional one” (p. 153).

We have no way of knowing whether those portrayed in Black Chronicles shared similar experiences with Douglass, whether, in other words, they were told such words by people (perhaps by some of those who commissioned the photographs). But we know that they found themselves in Britain at around the time Douglass lived in the US. And Britain was a powerful colonial empire, with its colonialism intimately tied to racism.

The difference between their experiences was that they were being photographed, whereas Douglass had himself photographed. These kinds of differences matter in many ways. And yet, it actually is not as straightforward to tie down photography to the extent that people believe it is. Photographs can serve different functions across the ages (or even at the very same time), and their meanings can shift decisively.

Douglass grasped that one truth of a photograph would not shift: as a human being, you’re made to face another human being when you look at a portrait (or rather you’re facing their likeness, but photography’s power is to make us forget about this fact). “Men of all conditions and classes can now see themselves as others see them,” he wrote, “and as they will be seen by those [who] shall come after them.” (p. 155)

For Douglass, this fact tied to the greater value of art, which separates human beings from animals: “The rudest and remotest tribes of men manifest this great human power — and thus vindicate the brotherhood of man.” (p. 157) Photography, in other words, serves as a tool for equality — even under circumstances where it might have arisen out of completely different circumstances.

“It is the picture of life,” he noted a little later in his essay, “contrasted with the fact of life, the idea contrasted with the real, which makes criticism possible. Where there is no criticism there is no progress, for the want of progress is not felt where such want is not made visible by criticism.” (p. 160; which, by the way, also is a blistering indictment of today’s newspaper and magazines that have largely done away with criticism)

Black Chronicles includes ample text, most prominently a long essay by curator Renée Mussai. There is much to learn from the various contributions, especially since they give a reader crucial insight into how the exhibition the book is based on was made and how contemporary curators and thinkers approach the photographs of these colonial subjects (some of them snatched from their home countries in the most gruesome fashion) in today’s Britain (a country in which, like in most other Western countries, the far right is openly racist).

The book is richly illustrated with many, many photographs. At times, it’s almost a bit much. I’m not one to decry the active role of graphic design; and yet, the prominent use of pull quotes (which mirrored how the photographs were shown in their exhibition setting) had me on edge: I did not really want to be distracted from the photographs. At times, I felt that the book’s maker did not trust that the photographs would do their own job.

Photographs pull a viewer in to encounter another human being — in the sense that photographs can do that, the sense that Frederick Douglass understood so well. Of course, it is impossible to imagine another person’s life and experiences, regardless of how close or how distant that person in a photograph might be to a viewer.

But that’s photography’s power — we see another person, and we imagine what they must experience or feel, even if we have no realistic basis for doing so. Victorian Britain was a radically different world than ours. And yet, to pick a different medium, when as a viewer you find yourself in front of a Roman bust, made to resemble the person as closely as possible, with all their bodily faults and characteristics, it is an encounter with that person across the aeons.

Whatever one might put on a photograph — whether it’s used to denigrate the person portrayed or to present them as some strange and possibly primitive other or to pull them out of their photographic otherness to lift them into equal status with a viewer, it will always speak for itself and, by extension, for the person portrayed.

The other day, I was reminded of one of the most searing protest photographs to arise from the United States. It was taken by Ernest C. Withers in 1968, during a strike by African American sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. The photograph shows a wall of men, almost all of them holding a simple sign that says “I am a man”.

A photographic portrait very much does the same thing: of the person portrayed, it says “I am a man”, “I am a woman”, “I am a person” — “I am a human being”. Even as this might not have been the intention of those who commissioned and/or made the photographs in Black Chronicles, this is the searing, important message behind the photographs.

As Frederick Douglass already noted about 160 years ago, that is the power of photography; and given our extremely troubled times, we might as well pay good attention to it — if, that is, we want to remain committed to building a better world once the fascists have been booted out of power.

Recommended.

Black Chronicles — Photography, Race and Difference in Victorian Britain; Edited by Renée Mussai; texts by Renée Mussai, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Caroline Bressey, Lola Jaye, M. Neelika Jayawardane, Mark Sealy, Val Wilmer; 304 pages; Autograph/Thames & Hudson; 2025

“What sort of provocation do the photographs of Rinko Kawauchi pose to my thinking?,” Masatake Shinohara asks a little bit over halfway through Inhabiting Light, his joint book with the photographer. Shinohara is a philosopher teaching at Kyoto University, and the book is a true collaboration between two very different people who, as becomes clear, are interested in the same thing.

“What is important about a photo,” Shinohara quotes Kawauchi in the Epilogue, “is the way one takes it, rather than what one takes.” Thinking about how this idea might connect to what we experience as reality, the philosopher notes that “we often feel that there is a kind of light present”, a light that brings us into contact with “the dimension of depth that remains at the edge of everyday life in a way that goes beyond our conscious grasp.”

The book arose from a back and forth: Kawauchi would send a photograph, Shinohara would write a text in response and send it back, after which the photographer would respond to the text… In the book, the photographs and responses are not presented side by side. Instead, they are presented on their own. The text never explains the photographs; the photographs never illustrate the text.

To call Inhabiting Light a philosophy of photography would be correct in some ways; and yet it would also be besides the point both authors are trying to make. All-too-often writing around photography ends up limiting both the medium and the world it visually describes; here the openness of the words and the pictures avoids that problem.

When engaging with the book, the reader/viewer learns something about what photography is or does. But their focus is mostly guided towards something that is just beyond our own understanding.

I suspect that this might pose a challenge for many who are used to the unfortunate, bland literalness that pervades photographic discourse these days.

But challenges are good, because it is only through challenges that new insight is to be gained. The challenge here is less an intellectual one (neither the photographs nor the text are overly complex) but a mental one: allowing for the possibility that one of the most technical media in fact might get at an aspect of the world that cannot be understood, but whose implications can be felt.

“When one pays attention to works of photography enabled by the machine as the product of modern technology,” Shinohara expresses this idea, “it becomes possible to glimpse a kind of elemental materiality that has not been saturated by human thought. […] We may come to think that we have been touched by a certain mystery.”

It is this aspect of Kawauchi’s work that has been noticed and expressed by other writers as well. It is most dominant in the photographer’s early work (with which she became well known) and most of her current work (as I’ve argued on this site before).

In light of Shinohara’s writing around this particular photographer’s work, it would be worthwhile paying more attention to how photography can hint at the unexpressable.

I suspect that I do not have to explain how such an approach would enrich a medium that is often hobbled by, as I noted, literalness, a medium whose full potential is often not used when it merely serves to illustrate ideas.

It would be straightforward to argue that the common reference to photography being “poetic” might get at similar ideas as those expressed in Inhabiting Light. But why would understanding photography have to operate on terms set by a completely different medium?

As a relative latecomer to the scene, of course it was inevitable that photography would be seen in relation to painting or poetry or whatever else. Photography thus became the youngest child among a group of much older siblings: spoiled and pampered, but not being taken too seriously — and always seen in relation to the older siblings.

Inhabiting Light severs that mechanism and dives into how photography can do its own things in its own unique fashion.

Soon enough — in a decade and a half — photography will enter the third century of its existence. It’s high time that the discourse around the medium reaches the maturity that one would imagine almost two full centuries of photographs would have resulted in.

Recommended.

Inhabiting Light – Dialogue on the Edge of the Everyday World; photographs by Rinko Kawauchi, words by Masatake Shinohara (Japanese/English); 136 pages; Torch Press; 2025

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