In late October this year, I traveled back to the town in northwestern Germany where I was born and where I spent the first two decades of my life. I had not been back since roughly the early to mid-1990s. There had not been a reason to go back for me, especially given how strained my relationship to my parents, and especially my father, had become. But now that he had died, I decided that I would attend his funeral.
I brought my camera to attempt to make sense of the world. For a few years, I had been wondering what it would be like to face locales that had had some meaning for me a long time ago. Now I would find out.
But there are only so many things a camera can capture. I had had plans to write about my experience as well, which did not work out as planned. There is only so much time in any given day. If that time is taken up with a memorial and funeral, with re-connecting with my brother, and with photographing, then the remainder of the time is better spent on creature comforts (good food and plenty of sleep).
Before I left, I thought that I needed to make something out of the trip — mostly for myself. I didn’t know what that something might be. But it felt as if years from now I would want to look back at this particular moment in my life not just in my thoughts but also through some form of creative expression.
I took a lot of photographs, but there were many things that happened in my head that needed to be expressed as well. With the idea of making something in mind, I decided to make a publication. I didn’t set myself a deadline, but I forced myself to write. In retrospect, I can say that this was a good idea. I not only wrote down things I experienced, through my writing I also came to understand that trip and many of my feelings a lot better.
Back in that city, my brother asked me to go through some of my old materials that, somehow, were still being kept in some old desk (that I didn’t remember but that I was told had been mine). But there also was a red box. Inside that red box, there were a large number of old family documents and some folders my father had assembled.
The folders provided the model for what the something I had been thinking about would become: a folder that contains a loose set of photographs (in random order) and a loose set of pieces of my writing (ditto).
You can see some of the photographs, some of the text, and information about that folder on my website. Please note that for this website to work, you will need a larger screen (meaning at the very least a tablet computer held horizontally or up). I actually don’t think any longer that every photo project needs to be viewable on a phone.
Complicated Feelings — that’s the name of the project and publication — allowed me to play with some ideas that I had had in my head for a while. As much as I like books, the fact that they’re so finished has always bugged me. How can one make something that is well considered but that is less formed? Something that contains a sense of openness and that might, in fact, change with time?
If someone decides to buy a copy, I’m assembling a new folder. There are added, hand written notes for some of the writing. I’m imagining that these notes might change as time passes and the trip becomes more and more a fact of my past life.
I don’t know what this might look like, and I also don’t know how one is to understand a publication that might exist in different forms, possibly with slightly different meanings. Making this publication allows me to find out. There’s no edition of any sorts: I will stop making these publications until interest in them has run out (whether its audience’s or mine — whichever comes first).
I also like the idea of imperfection that is contained in the publication. My hand writing differs from day to day, the order in which I place the photographs changes every time. What needs to be controlled is controlled (the way things are printed, say). But every person gets their own, unique copy, and every one is imperfect in its own ways. Right now, this approach appeals to me.
This is the first and very likely last very personal project. I can’t say that I particularly like this aspect (I am a very private person); but I am still very open to seeing what this might do. It might do nothing, or it might do something that I am unable to foresee right now.
Not everything needs to be personal, but the deeply personal ought to be.
In my own teaching, I always tell my students to consider their future self as the one person to make a publication for: make something that your future self will be happy to have, even as they’re likely to have outgrown your current self.
I don’t know what I will be making of this publication in five or ten years. What I do know, though, is how important this advice is, given how making something for my future self forced me to face my complicated feelings.
If you’re interested in buying a copy of Complicated Feelings (again, don’t look at this on your phone) have a look at the details on the website and send me an email (jmcolberg at gmail.com).