Portrait of J

The idea that one would be able to produce a portrait of a whole country by assembling an assortment of portraits of some of its denizens is ludicrous. But in the world of photography this unfortunate idea has become a staple of its discourse through the work of August Sander who created his much celebrated People of the Twentieth Century, a portrait of the German people (whoever or whatever that might actually be — it’s still, or maybe I should say more than ever — widely contested in the country).

“It is possible,” Sander is being quoted, “to record the historical physiognomic image of a whole generation and—with enough knowledge of physiognomy—to make that image speak in photographs.” This idea should scare the bejesus out of anyone who has even remote knowledge of anthroposcopy and its applications. I suppose this is why the writer of the article I quoted from felt compelled to add a footnote: “Physiognomy was also disturbingly utilized by the Nazis for racial profiling and for justifying Aryan superiority.” You don’t say!

The sad aspects about this are that first, as a human being, Sander was a committed democrat who, alas, took some of his ideas from the 19th Century he had been born into, and that second, Sander’s life work is artistically so strong and fruitful that it can yield enormous power even without the conceptual framework the photographer put it into.

Beyond that, though, even if you were to photograph each and every inhabitant of some country, you would still not have a portrait of it. Instead, you would have a collection of photographs of these people — the trees, but not the forest.

Fortunately, taking portraits of every person in a country is mostly impossible, given the numbers involved. This should give us pause when considering what we’re actually looking at when approaching a collection of portraits originating from some locale. Through (mostly) the artistic choices and (secondly) those portrayed themselves, we are made to face someone’s vision of what their (or some other) country might be.

Beyond that, especially if the photographs were taken over a longer period of time, we get to experience one of the most important aspects of the photographer, the very core of their artistic belief. In Sander’s case, we are made to face someone who despite the brutalities of the era he was born into (the convoluted and violent emergence and convulsions of a united Germany) managed to see people as human beings and who felt a deep connection with them, even as many of those in front of his camera probably did not feel the same (certainly not the Nazis who would imprison and ultimately kill one of his sons).

In part, Sander’s work is so intriguing because in it, two world collide: the world of the 19th Century into which he had been born and in which he started out as a traditional studio portraitist, and the world of the early 20th Century in Germany with its aforementioned convulsions. In effect, Sander looked at the early 20th Century with the eyes of someone from the 19th Century, visually capturing a world that in daily life refused to be captured.

With all that said, Takashi Homma’s Portrait of J obviously isn’t a portrait of Japan, even as the publisher insists that the photographer “invites us to contemplate the everyday and extraordinary faces that form the social and cultural fabric of contemporary Japan”. To begin with, if it were that, the book would be a lot less interesting than it actually is: what exactly would one gain from the exercise? In what fashion would “the social and cultural fabric of contemporary Japan” emerge in one’s mind?

Isn’t the idea of art exactly the opposite, namely to focus excessively and with sheer self-absorbed dedication on the particular — and the particular alone — to evoke some larger and vague ideas in a viewer’s head?

I personally am so interested in Japan that I have been subjecting myself to the mostly wretched exercise of attempting to learn its language, an effort made torturous through the sheer randomness and idiosyncrasies of its writing system (which is so random that even Japanese people often do not know how to read certain characters). Ever since I first visited, I have been deeply fascinated by a country that makes it so incredibly hard to be approached, let alone understood by outsiders.

So no, maybe this is part of where the above is coming from, but if someone offers me the opportunity to “contemplate the everyday and extraordinary faces that form the social and cultural fabric of contemporary Japan” I’d rather be booking a flight to see for myself.

What, instead, I am interested in and what fascinates me about this book is not the (supposed) fact that I’m seeing Japan; it is that I am seeing the cultural world this particular photographer is enmeshed in.

Contrary to the claims made about the book, the people therein originate from a very small section of Japan. For a lack of a better description, it’s mostly (but not exclusively) creative people who operate along similar lines as Homma himself.

This includes many photographers (including but not limited to Yurie Nagashima, Daido Moriyama, or Takuma Nakahira), writers (such as Haruki Murakami), designers, fashion stylists or designers, architects, models, and actors. To say that the book portrays Japan’s creative class would be as precise as saying it portrays the country as a whole — but you are a lot closer.

There is a coolness going through the book, a being-cool-ness — exemplified by these people who know of their creative powers but who also know that in effect, they’re outsiders more than archetypes of their country. Again, what would be an archetype of a country? But with, for example, the people typically described by the term salaryman being absent, there is a statement being made here.

Even as they define them in a different fashion, the Japanese appreciate the margins of their society as much as Germans do or people living in the US: mostly not very much, the cultural margins being somewhat excepted (given the associated international prestige derived from them).

Cultural margins are driven by a combination of selfish creativity and a refusal to conform, something that in the West is mostly acceptable. In Japan, however, this plays out very differently.

Given their associated cultural capital, the people in these photographs are the few nails that do not get hammered down (to bring up the Japanese expression 出る釘は打たれる [deru kugi wa utareru] — “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down”), the few nails that, however begrudgingly, are allowed to do what they need to do.

It would be impossible to imagine a Japan in which those portrayed in Portrait of J would exemplify the country. That would not be Japan any longer.

For better or worse (you choose), the Japan excluded from this book is the one that makes the one shown here possible. You can’t have one without the other; but you always want to remember that they’re the two sides of the same coin.

Recommended.

Portrait of J; Photographs by Takashi Homma; 232 pages; Dashwood Books/Session Press; 2025

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What do I want to know about Weege?

I missed Christopher Bonanos’ Flash — The Making of Weegee the Famous when it came out in 2018. I can’t be certain, though. Part of me thinks that I did notice the book. But I had previously read Weegee’s “autobiography”, and I think that had discouraged me from looking further into the man’s life (until I came across a copy of Flash a little while ago in a local second-hand bookshop).

Of that “autobiography”, Bonanos writes that it is “an oddly opaque book”. I didn’t think so. He writes that “by the end, even as he seems mildly appalling, he wins you over. He seems fun.” (p. 291) The word “mildly” has to do a lot of work there. Furthermore, no, and no. Weegee didn’t win me over, and he certainly did not seem fun (but what do I know about fun, what with me being originally German?).

Whatever thoughts I had about Weegee, his Naked City is a masterpiece of a book, mostly because it’s actually more nuanced and intelligent than its makers might have realized. If it were merely some assembly of the kinds of gore pictures the photographer became and remains well known for, it would be a dud. But there is a tenderness that leads you through the book and that convinces you, or at least me (because your mileage might vary), that there is more than mere photographic effect.

Naked City is the depiction of New York City at a certain point in time, parts of which have survived, and larger parts of which are now long gone. For sure, Weegee would not recognize the area where he first lived when he arrived with his family. The tenements are gone; the brutal capitalism that has been driving this city now expresses itself differently.

The follow-up Weegee’s People mostly is a dud, because what had made Naked City so good was now gone. And Naked Hollywood is, well, a sorry-ass disaster of a book: it is as if the photographer had pursued his worst instincts, and nobody had had the guts (or heart) to say that the world did not need to see how far Weegee had fallen.

The man’s “autobiography” had not provided any insight. It’s not necessarily that I need to know about people’s private lives (personally, I’m a very private person). It’s just that I am interested in learning how photographers (and artists) arrive at what they produce. Or rather how some of them do, because honestly, there are a lot of photographers and artists where I don’t care, where, in other words, whatever life experiences they might have had, to me they seem irrelevant. For them, the work will suffice.

And it’s not necessarily people whose work I admire where I might seek out insight into their lives. This endeavour doesn’t always work out (in fact, it mostly does not). When, for example, Avedon: Something Personal was published, I bought a copy. I wanted to find out whether there was a person of substance (any substance really) behind the work, some of which I admire, some of which I loathe.

I never found out. For me, Avedon: Something Personal is an unreadable exercise in hagiography, an endless parade of how brilliant “Dick” was. Honestly, there’s no insight to be gained for a reader (or, for that matter, writer) if you start out by declaring genius at the very beginning: there’s no hill left to climb, and anything you can offer will become subservient to the idea of genius (you see, only a genius would buy this brand of toothpaste and not that one).

My interest in Avedon was different than the one in Weegee. The Avedon one was more specific, and by now I did receive an answer to some of my questions (I will write about this in the very near future).

In some ways, Avedon and Weegee were very similar in that they both cultivated a very specific image of themselves, however different they might have been.

With Avedon, it was always clear to me that he had had an inner life and that he was aware of what he was doing. With Weegee, I was never sure. It’s not even that I wanted to know a lot more about Weegee, it was just that I wanted to know that he had had some inner life. If he did… I mean obviously, he did. What I was after were some hints what it might have been.

Having read Flash — The Making of Weegee the Famous I don’t think I know all that much more about the man. This is not to belittle Bonanos’ effort. I do know a lot more about certain things. For example, I now know that the famous photograph The Critic was arranged: the photographer had liquored up an acquaintance and brought her along to ogle at wealthy people arriving at the Metropolitan Opera.

There had been talk of Weegee arranging things here and there — possibly moving a dead man’s hat for photographic effect or even moving a dead man to get a better picture near a sign. I personally don’t think that purely photographically speaking any of this truly matters all that much; or rather moving a hat doesn’t seem quite as bad as moving a body (if it actually happened; these stories might merely have been expressions of jealousy by other photographers).

And really, the drunk acquaintance in The Critic is a stand-in for the man himself, because behind all the bluster and the stories was a man who appeared to have known and detested that he was widely seen as uncultured. That is, in fact, the actual word that was used in a newspaper article about him early on, uncultured.

“Uncultured” is a giveaway (much like “normal” is): no person is uncultured. It’s just that some people have different cultures than others. Originally, Weegee was from Złoczów — now Zolochiv and part of Ukraine, then some outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was born as Ascher (later Usher, later Arthur) Fellig, and he was Jewish. The family wasn’t wealthy back in Złoczów, and it certainly wasn’t when everybody had made their way to New York City.

That newspaper calling him uncultured gave away the game, and we must assume that Weegee knew. There’s no other explanation for the fact that he clearly detested the very circles that he tried so very hard later in life to finally become a part of. But we can’t know for sure.

At some stage, Flash — The Making of Weegee the Famous becomes a progression of narrations around which picture was taken when or the kinds of pictures taken in what month or week or whatever. This is a wee bit tedious, and it frustrated me, given that I wanted to know about the man and not his pictures.

The end of the prohibition was basically the end of Weegee because as murder rates dropped and as organized crime ceased to be the menace it had been, a lot of pictures just disappeared. And thus Naked City turned into Weegee’s People: hard-hitting material that revealed the abyss of the human condition turned into a mostly sentimental simulation of what binds people together.

Weegee without the murders simply wasn’t Weegee any longer. Instead, the photographer kept repeating the same tropes (and pictures). It didn’t help that he thought forms of trick photography would do anything for him. And that’s ignoring the shallow lechery that increasingly showed up in some of his photographs.

I can’t be certain after reading Bonanos’ biography, but I don’t think Weegee understood what made some of his own pictures so good. Part of the reason appeared to have been that his mode of work almost inevitably required making new pictures. If your actual livelihood depends on getting pictures so you can pay for that little room you live in, it’s not surprising that there might simply be no time to spend more time with what you’ve made.

Weegee’s disdain of the circles who thought of him as uncultured is fully understandable; and yet, looking down on other Photo League photographers who might have known a thing or two about how to learn more about one’s work probably wasn’t the greatest idea.

Regardless, I don’t think that I got my answer after reading Flash — The Making of Weegee the Famous, and that’s not Bonanos’ fault. Maybe I don’t have to know more about the man who produced Naked City. Maybe having a copy of the original book in my library is good enough.

For whatever combination of circumstances and life decisions that weren’t pondered too closely, Weegee made the work he made: pictures that were and still are right in your face. And the prohibition era provided just the right environment with just the right material to have him succeed from there — and fail so miserably later.

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Porträts von Lotte Jacobi

When the previous German government fell apart, the AfD party (an assortment of Nazis and far-right populists) polled at around 16%. At the time, the conservative party (CDU) had embraced its own right-wing populist faction (“conservatives”), exemplified by Friedrich Merz who, given the polling, was destined to become Germany next chancellor. Merz had vowed to cut the AfD’s numbers in half, admittedly a noble goal.

Merz’s approach of attempting to reduce support for the AfD was to adopt many of their talking points. Following a relatively short election season, the AfD gained 20% of the votes. Merz formed a government with the social democrats and continued his approach. Now, the AfD party polls at 25%.

There obviously is a lesson here: Adopting far-right talking points and policies will only strengthen the very people who came up with the ideas in the first place. German “conservatives”, however, do not want to learn this lesson. Instead, they keep going (most likely because they simply have no problem with far-right ideas in the first place).

Part of the “conservative” play book is the frequent use of culture-war topics. As in many other countries, “tradition” plays a huge role (in this context, “tradition” is a loaded term, it almost inevitably is a smorgasbord of hard-line conservative and outright reactionary ideas). In Germany, working with tradition is a little bit more difficult, given the country’s history. Unless you are an outright Nazi (of which there are many, and they’re now out in the open), you can’t simply pursue a red thread through the country’s past.

For German “conservatives”, the work-around has been what they call Leitkultur (which you might translate as dominant culture). Germany still bills itself as the Land der Dichter und Denker (the country of poets and thinkers), so a focus on culture and language mostly gets around the Hitler problem. At least that’s the idea.

Given that outright racism in Germany is still shunned, Leitkultur can serve as a neat foil to fold someone’s racist or anti-Muslim sentiments into what looks like a presentable package. The idea is simple: people may arrive from somewhere else, but they need to adapt to Germany’s “traditions” and culture. How or why new arrivals are not allowed to enrich German tradition or culture in their own ways is never explained.

Also note how this approach repackages basic intolerance or racism into something that looks presentable. If, for example, someone won’t eat pork because of their religion, religious prejudices are simply reframed. Now it’s the newcomers fault that they won’t conform: hey, it’s out Leitkultur to stuff our faces with sausages (this might sound like a crass description, but Bavaria’s right-wing populist governor has made a whole career out of exactly this approach to repackaging bigotry as a love for very specific food [example]).

As I already noted, one of the ideas behind Leitkultur is that German culture survived unscathed during the Nazi years (1933-1945). Work by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, say, was not marred by the presence of a dictatorial government that not only committed vast atrocities but was also responsible for the Holocaust — at least that’s the idea. Of course, the reality of how German culture went through the Hitler years is vastly more complicated — and not quite as rosy as conservatives would want you to believe.

A little while ago, I decided that I needed a book with work by Lotte Jacobi. Born and raised in Germany, and trained as a photographer, Jacobi worked in her father’s photography studio but also established herself as a photographer.

She quickly became known for her skills at making portraits, resulting in a large number of well-known Weimar Republic figures being portrayed by her. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, her work was being praised. But Jacobi was a dedicated leftist, and she was Jewish. In 1935, she fled to the US with her son, leaving behind a vast amount of her work. Jacobi re-opened a studio in New York and continued the work she had been doing in Berlin.

Among the people she photographed in the US were many others who, like her, had left Germany, most famously Albert Einstein. When trying to find a book with her work, I wasn’t necessarily looking for one with only photographs of emigrés. But I came across a book entitled Berlin–New York (Porträts von Lotte Jacobi) for $9.49, so I ordered it. There wasn’t much information about it other than a few spreads (including a portrait of Lotte Lenya that I had wanted to have somewhere in my library).

When the book arrived, I learned that it contained only portraits of writers, many, but not all, emigrés. That wasn’t quite what I had been looking for, but things quickly got a lot more interesting. To begin with, the book includes a bookplate that says “Acknowledging special achievements in German literature and language. Presented by the German Consulate General Boston.” (my translation)

Given that there’s no name of the original recipient listed, I can now pretend that I have been awarded for my non-existing achievements in German literature.

Joking aside, though, the sticker immediately made the book more interesting, in light of the people who Jacobi portrayed and in light of the various Leitkultur discussions in today’s Germany (the book was published in 1983, I have no way of knowing when it was presented to the original recipient).

About half of the portraits were done in Germany, the rest in the US. For example, Thomas Mann, widely considered one of the giants of German literature in the first half of the 20th Century and recipient of the 1929 Nobel Prize, was photographed in Princeton (there are two photographs, one shows him sitting next to and in conversation with Einstein).

For each of the photographs, there’s a name, year and locale of birth and death (where applicable), and the year when the picture was taken. What threw me were the places where Jacobi’s subjects had died. Here is an assortment of some of Germany’s most well known writers, many of them emigrés — and many never returned to Germany after the war.

Unless I’m overlooking someone, two, Carl von Ossietzky (awarded the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize) and Erich Mühsam, were murdered by the Nazis (Mühsam died in a concentration camp in 1934).

Thomas Mann died in Kilchberg (Switzerland), never returning to live in Germany after the war (he did visit). His older brother Heinrich died in Santa Monica (USA). Lotte Lenya, whose portrait by Jacobi I had always admired, died in New York City (USA; by the way, the book groups Germans and Austrians together, which might be a topic for a different discussion). Lion Feuchtwanger died in Los Angeles (USA). And there are many more.

I’ve been trying to square these facts with the idea of Leitkultur. If the leading literary proponents of what you call your Leitkultur decided to leave Nazi Germany, I suppose this might prove that culture itself was not affected by the Nazis (even as the writers themselves were).

But if a large number of the writers never came back, then the distinction one could make between writers and their work starts falling apart pretty quickly: after all, what should have re-emerged after the war is the good Germany (for a lack of better words), the real Germany, the one with that tradition of Goethe and all the other people.

Apparently, many of the writers didn’t see it that way. And — how awkward for the West Germans who produced the book – some writers decided to move to East Germany.

In the end, the real problem, of course, is the very idea of Leitkultur itself. Ignoring the fact that decreeing that some parts of a country’s culture should be more dominant than others is bad enough, the idea that you somehow can separate culture from people is immensely flawed. Furthermore, the idea that culture is its own entity that exists in parallel to what actual people do is also flawed.

As I noted already, German conservatives using Leitkultur are engaged in an exercise in culture war. But it’s actually worse than that: contemporary Germany prides itself on having dealt with its past. But insisting on a Leitkultur that only consists of the good parts, while pretending that the bad parts do not matter, is exactly the opposite of what Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with one’s past) supposedly is all about.

Instead, it’s an exercise in denial. The difference between German conservatives’ Leitkultur and the AFD’s idea of a glorious German past is a difference of degree and not of kind.

You do not get to cherry pick your past; you have to accept all of it.

Of course, it’s the biographical details in Berlin–New York that drive home this point. You wouldn’t know from the photographs what someone’s life story was.

What you do know from the photographs, though, is that all of those portrayed knew of their power. By that I mean that in the photographs I see that they knew what they could do with the written word. There is a confidence in the way they look at the camera, the way they comport themselves in front of Jacobi’s camera.

It is as if they all were convinced that they were part of a larger endeavour, an endeavour that united them in ways that was never to be divided by petty penny pinchers in power.

Lotte Jacobi also never moved back. She continued her career first in New York and later in New Hampshire where she died in 1990. Her archives are now held by the University of New Hampshire.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to my Patreon. There, you will find exclusive articles, videos, and audio guides about the world of the photobook and more. For those curious, there now is the possibility of a trial membership for seven days.

Much like journalism, photography criticism involves a huge investment of time and resources. When you become a subscriber, you not only get access to more of my work. You will also help me produce it (including the free content on this site).

There also is a Mailing List, which I use to send out supplementary materials — anything that has me inspired or that somehow seemed worth noting. Some of it is serious, some is not. You can sign up for free here.

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Border Documents

There have been a relatively large number of photographic bodies of work made around the border between the United States and Mexico. In effect, for most people in the West, that border has become a convenient screen onto which to project their ideas. This also is what artists do: project their ideas onto someone or something, to (ideally) extract some deeper meaning from it.

Over the years, I have received a number of requests to review work made around that border. I mostly couldn’t bring myself to do it — not because the work was or is necessarily bad. It’s just that the projection mostly remains unacknowledged.

Maybe this is easier to see when looking at, say, the projects (mostly male) German photographers produce around Los Angeles with depressing regularity: none of them are really about LA. The fact that there is a lot of driving involved in LA (one of the reasons why I personally can’t stand the city) is not telling anyone anything new.

What’s really going on is a group of people admiring what they don’t have in Germany (at least to that extent: cars über alles if you will), while simultaneously somewhat smugly looking down on a perceived lack of civic culture in LA and, by extension, the US.

The border invites similar mechanisms, and the fact that the far right has been using it to score political points using shallow resentment isn’t helping. Of course, the border isn’t really the problem per se; it’s the fact that people are crossing it even though they’re not supposed to, and those people also happen to be brown — and not the milky white that the far right prefers.

It’s one thing to project one’s own ideas onto a city and its cars; it’s quite another to do it with actual human beings involved. And that’s one of the reasons why I’ve mostly stayed away from writing about projects about the border: it just doesn’t strike me as the ideal situation and/or place to use for one’s idea of art, regardless of how good one’s intentions might be.

Those crossing the border, often after very long treks across thousands of kilometers, are already kept in a state of anonymity (if you don’t believe me: what’s the name of the little girl who is crying in that heartbreaking photo that I’m sure you’ll remember?).

As the past few months have cruelly shown, it is when people are plucked out of anonymity that cracks will appear in the convenient projections: Trump’s approval rating around immigration cratered once the faces and stories of some of the Venezuelans shipped to a concentration camp in El Salvador became known (this collection of words and pictures by Adriana Loureiro Fernández will break your heart).

In addition, there is the fact that borders typically cut across communities, even if these communities might not be homogeneous. The coming and going from one side to the other involves commerce as much as cultural exchanges, resulting in connections being made across the border and both sides getting enriched, whether in a literal (monetary) sense or otherwise.

If you look at a border, especially when you’re an outsider, you will miss all of that. Then, there’s just this side, and once you cross, there is the other side. The end result is that things can easily become very reductive.

Arturo Soto‘s Border Documents is an outlier in all of this border work in more ways than one. This starts with its form. At 165 × 95 mm (6.5 × 3.75 inches), it’s a most unassuming softcover book. You’re likely going to hold it in one hand, using the other to look through it. The intimacy of the experienced in this fashion is crucial, because the text contained in the book is very personal.

It’s a man’s story, and that man tells you about growing up right near the border (in Juárez, right across the border from El Paso [USA]). The man is the photographer’s father, and many relatives make an appearance. Given that many of the relatively short stories originate from the narrators childhood or adolescence, there is an innocence to the narration: things are experienced without much of an added judgment.

The combination of that innocence and the various shenanigans the narrator was engaged in is disarming. In effect, the book centers on the border; but the border itself becomes a side character — if even that. Instead, the very specific life experience of someone who happened to grow up there allows the reader to get access to his world.

Many of the texts are paired with photographs Soto took at the various locales mentioned in the text. It’s not always straightforward to tell the US and Mexico apart, even though details, of course, will make things clear.

What makes Border Documents so strong is how inconsequential almost everything narrated in the book is — inconsequential in the larger sense, not in the familial sense, of course. But it is exactly the fact that so many things in a person’s life are inconsequential that cracks open the image of the border: it’s simply a largely random line on a map that cuts through the land, now in the form of some huge fence (“border wall”).

And the Juárez narrated in the book has changed as well. The last entry is dated 1981, and it talks about the narrator taking a job in Mexico City, “wanting to shield my newborn son from the vices and limitations of Juárez”.

“But when it all ends,” he concludes, “I want my ashes to be spread on the Río Bravo to recover the time lost and safeguard my side of the border, in whichever way possible, against the fury of the American empire.”

This, after all, is how it goes: if one side wants to close their hearts and their part of the border, then the other side can do it as well.

It’s everyone’s loss.

Recommended.

Border Documents; photographs and text by Arturo Soto; 144 pages; The Eriskay Connection; 2025

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to my Patreon. There, you will find exclusive articles, videos, and audio guides about the world of the photobook and more. For those curious, there now is the possibility of a trial membership for seven days.

Much like journalism, photography criticism involves a huge investment of time and resources. When you become a subscriber, you not only get access to more of my work. You will also help me produce it (including the free content on this site).

There also is a Mailing List, which I use to send out supplementary materials — anything that has me inspired or that somehow seemed worth noting. Some of it is serious, some is not. You can sign up for free here.

Thank you for your support!