Conscientious Photography Magazine

The Lines We Draw

2025-03-24T12:36:56Z

For better or worse, communities play a very important part of human life. Communities range from the most basic unit, the family, up to larger and larger numbers of people. Some communities are chosen — such as when someone decides to join a chess club, say; while others are mostly not.

For example, if, like me, you’re born in the relatively small town of Wilhelmshaven, Germany, then you are a Norddeutscher, someone who not only originates from northern Germany but who, at least that’s the idea, displays certain characteristics that people from there either claim to have or are said to have.

Therein lies the rub: often, community is a lot less well defined than those within it would like to imagine. Families have their black sheep, chess clubs tend to erupt in rather pointless infighting over the proper rules of engagement as a club, some North Germans are stoic and don’t talk very much while others will chew your ear of.

Community, in other words, tends to come with bad blood, and bad blood has the potential to create open conflicts, even (or maybe especially) when the underlying reasons have long been forgotten or were so minor that in retrospect the whole conflict seems positively ridiculous.

But we stick to communities because they’re not only the sources of conflict. They’re also the sources of deep meaning, regardless of whether that meaning is derived from abstract principles or from something very real.

The largest communities we know are conglomerates of states such as the European Union or the United Nations. Just below these conglomerates sit the smaller ones, states or countries, that often are less poorly defined than you might imagine. Or rather, they can be defined in any which way — whether originally from the outside or inside.

And therein lies the trouble, because not all peoples have their own sovereign entities — even if they want to. But also not all sovereign entities contain all the people that they think they should contain. Or, and this is where things can get particularly iffy, some people think they should have their sovereign entities while the rest of the country they belong to will deny their request.

With their book The Lines We Draw, Lavinia Parlamenti and Manfredi Pantanella decided to focus on five different regions of the world that are not widely accepted as their own sovereign entities but that for some reason or another either exist as one or strive to do so. They are the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic (Transnistria), the Republic of Catalonia, the Republic of Artsakh, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR).

The duo traveled to these five locations to photograph there and to collect material for their book that is intended to look into what this might entail: being a sovereign entity. In principle, photography is not particularly well suited for such endeavours, but clearly the inclusion of a vast range of materials in the book is intended to help guide a viewer/reader towards some more clarity.

The subject matter with its various complexities (some of them being more real than others) presents a challenge for anyone trying to approach it in a photobook. I think the gold standard for such work is still set by the books produced by Rob Hornstra and Arnold van der Bruggen (The Socci Project) who managed to distill the many details they encountered in the Caucasus into a series of very clear and engaging books.

With their work, Parlamenti and Pantanella could have created a book with five separate chapters, each of which with a focus on one region. That probably would have been moderately interesting, but it would not have been able to get at the larger idea.

Instead, the duo opted for a book in which photographs and material from their various travels intermix. Visually, that was a very good idea. It is clear from the photographs that they were taken in different locales. Their juxtaposition opens up very intriguing relationships between seemingly disjointed parts.

This is where (or how) photography can be incredibly enlightening not despite of its shortcomings but because of it: you can make people see things that are difficult to describe.

Alas, the book utilizes an impossibly complex concept that creates a lot of confusion because it insists on the viewer being presented with a myriad of information at all times. In addition, images or text pieces are cut in half in numerous places, continuing elsewhere. At times, I even felt micromanaged, given how insistent the authors were that I would get exactly that one point they felt they needed to push.

It’s the kind of concept that violates the most important tenet of photobook making: keep it simple. Especially with complex topics, you don’t want to make a complex book because one (the complex book) does not help the other (the complex topic). And you want to leave some space for your audience’s imagination.

I tried looking at the various details in the book a number of times, only to get confused and bogged down in details that I did not think I needed to know. Ultimately, I realized that if I only looked at the photographs and ignored the rest, the book created a lot of interest in me.

In part, this is because the photography is mostly very, very good. More often than not the combination of the various photographs evokes a state of hallucination: what is real and what is not? Because, after all, is it not hallucination that sits at the core of so much of what is taken as the basis for a country?

Of course, that’s not how we tend to approach things in the real world (from which, it is important to note, these photographs were taken). Hallucinations aren’t real. But are the divisions in a chess club over some rules real? Are the differences between two people who happen to live on different parts of what might be an arbitrarily drawn line on a map real?

With so many conflicts and wars still erupting over those lines on the map (whether drawn previously or to be added later) — can’t we approach all of this as a huge hallucination and focus on what really matters? On being human beings living next to and with other human beings?

The Lines We Draw; photographs and text by Lavinia Parlamenti and Manfredi Pantanella; text by Hugo Meijer and Maja Spanu; 272 pages; self published; 2024

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Romanzo Meticcio

2025-03-17T12:27:48Z

Davide Degano‘s Romanzo Meticcio begins with reproductions from a 1938 pamphlet or magazine. I don’t speak Italian, but many of the words are familiar enough even in their somewhat different spellings. Razza bears similarity to Rasse from German (race in English). Il principio della razza seems clear enough (the year is 1938 when Italy was under fascist rule), and I bastardi certainly is, especially given the range of photographs used to illustrate the idea.

And it keeps going this way for two more pages; I can’t help but move a little faster through these pages. It’s not that I can’t believe that almost 90 years ago this type of material was so widely believed and assimilated; it’s the fact that the Vice President of the country I live in essentially repeats it on a regular basis on TV.

Italy’s curse is that it occupies the territories from which the Roman Empire sprang many hundreds of years ago. It’s difficult to go anywhere there without stumbling upon some of its ruins.

I don’t know how many generations have passed since it crumbled into dust; but it’s probably exactly those many generations that allow for the idealization that we can now observe not just in Italy (some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley are very fond of that Empire even as it is obvious that they know very little about it).

Mussolini, the original fascist, built the foundation of his rule on his country’s distant and presumed glorious past. Never mind that the Romans were actually very liberal with their ideas of citizenship. A number of Roman emperors actually weren’t Italian. Trajan and Hadrian hailed from what is now Spain. Septimius Severus was born in Northern Africa and appeared to have had roots there. Marcus Julius Philippus is commonly known as Philip the Arab.

As one of the texts in the back of Romanzo Meticcio explains, Trajan, Hadrian, Septimus Severus, and Marcus Julius Philippus would have to apply for Italian citizenship if they lived today: “To this day,” Davide Valeri explains, “Italian citizenship is considered a right for those with the same blood, while it is a prize or a gift for all the others. Non-descendants of Italians have to earn it by proving how deserving they are to be accepted by Italian society.” (emphases in the original)

Up until fairly recently, the situation was exactly the same in the country I was born in, Germany. Many thousands of young people, born to so-called guest workers from Turkey and elsewhere, did not have German passports even though they had never lived in a another country. Based on what the texts in the book tell me, this is still the situation in Italy, meaning that many of the people in the photographs are finding themselves in this situation.

Race and citizenship ultimately are merely constructs to divide people, regardless of whether that division is ideological or bureaucratic (let’s not argue over whether you can have one without the other).

The inclusion of the historical text right at the beginning of Romanzo Meticcio is heavy handed. It’s likely that a viewer would have figured out what’s going on by looking at the photographs first, to then be told some of the background. Alas, we don’t live in times that ask for a more, let’s say, polite treatment of the matter.

Furthermore, the texts charges the photographs before the viewer has seen them. And it is exactly that fact that lends them such potency, in particular the many portraits of people, most of them young, who one suspects belong to the group that would have to prove that they’re “deserving […] to be accepted by Italian society”.

Romanzo Meticcio unfolds through a combination of photographs of Italy’s lived environment and portraits. We could have a discussion over whether all of the photographs of people are in fact portraits. But that would take us into the neutered photoland territory where ultimately nothing matters other than photographic dogma. So let’s not do that. If we define a photographic portrait as a picture that conveys something about a person’s spirit, we’re good.

Because that’s what this ultimately is all about — the book as much as the struggle we’re now witnessing in our collective sphere: is one person’s spirit of equal value as another person’s, regardless of how different the two people might be?

As far as I can tell, typically discussions start out from abstract concepts and then try to move to the people affected by them. However, it’s very much worthwhile to do it the other way around: to start from basic principles. Doing it this way places the burden of proof on the Italian government to justify why some people have to earn their right of citizenship even though they’re born in the exact same country as the others who don’t.

Romanzo Meticcio clearly is a book of and for our times. Unlike many other contemporary photobooks, in which their makers try very hard to avoid making an open statement, here it’s very clear. And it works not only because of Degano’s clear convictions but also because of the quality of the photographs.

The photographs are seductive and delicate, even when there is someone in a portrait who channels his inner Mussolini. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any illusions about people who vote for fascists. But I also know what denying another person’s humanity can lead to. Still, at any given moment, the focus cannot be on trying to understand fascist voters while so many other people are literally fearing for their lives.

Romanzo Meticcio was published with a relatively modest edition size — 300 copies, meaning (possibly) that you might have to act fast to get yours (assuming you want one). The book is a marvelous achievement by Davide Degano, a new addition to the Italian photography scene.

Recommended.

Romanzo Meticcio; photographs by Davide Degano; texts by Davide Degano, David Forgacs, Igiaba Scego, Davide Valeri; 160 pages; Artphilein; 2024

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Scenes of Absence

2025-03-10T12:33:53Z

One of the challenges with words is that they will shade how you view photographs. While you can in fact use words with photographs, making them an integral part of the work, I think for the most parts words are being added to photographs after the fact, to serve as a statement to go alongside them or maybe as a slightly longer text to provide some context.

Depending on whether you see your photographs as the work or not — or maybe whether you want your audience to focus only on the photographs — a problem arises: the words might draw a lot of attention to themselves or to the story that they convey, a story that maybe would not reveal itself in quite this fashion in the pictures. Words, after all, function differently that pictures: they’re specific in ways that pictures are not.

On the other hand, it’s not clear whether an insistence on the primacy of photographs really helps to work with the full breadth of possibilities the medium has to offer. In part, that insistence on the primacy of photographs derives from the medium’s practitioners’ earliest attempts to establish their craft as, well, a form of art. Conventions were copied and adopted from other media (mostly painting) that undercut photography and vast parts of its potential.

In the end, if text has not been made an integral part of the work a photographic body of work still has to convey its intended purpose in a clear and self-contained fashion. However, even though many pieces of text added on later have as much utility as, say, a blurb a publisher might produce to sell a novel, there are cases where the text might add an essential part of the experience.

This certainly is the case for Touyama Yuhki‘s Scenes of Absence (頭山ゆう紀 — 残された風景; please note that I’m following the Japanese convention used on the book’s cover: family name followed by given name). If you were to ignore the text at the end, you would not only miss insight into how the work was made and what it alludes to. You would also miss one of the most heart-breaking pieces of text written by a photographer I’ve read in a while.

The text begins with the photographer’s grandmother announcing a cancer diagnosis that at age 92. Given her age and possibly also given the restrictions posed by the then ongoing Covid pandemic, the decision is being made not to pursue treatment. Instead, Touyama moves in with her grandmother and takes on the role as a home carer (at least initially supported through regular visits by a nurse and doctor).

Contrary to the initial assessment (“she has only three months at best”), the grandmother beats medical odds and survives for over a year. While taking care of her grandmother’s needs, Touyama takes photographs when she finds the time: the outside world seen from the inside or scenes encountered while being out on errands. As I suppose anyone can imagine, the long-term role of a caregiver is taking an increasing toll on her, though.

“My time as a caregiver had not gone well,” Touyama writes. The final three paragraphs of her text are absolutely heartbreaking. In it, the photographer voices her frustrations with relatives who abandoned her with the task at hand (“my father’s inability to take care of my grandmother because ‘men just can’t do that'”) and with herself (“I should have shown her more kindness”).

Once the grandmother has passed away, Touyama Yuhki is left to live with, in her own words, “endless regret and questions. Although I read lots of articles and books on caregiving, in actual practice I couldn’t keep up with what I learned.” The photographs are almost entirely devoid of her inner turmoil; and it is precisely this fact that makes the combination of the text and the photographs so poignant.

After reading the text, I found myself looking through the book time and again, trying to pinpoint some of what I had read in a photograph. Was there a way to see a sign of frustration, of trying to make her grandmother’s time more bearable? In the end, I am convinced that what I saw I only saw because I either wanted to see it or because I imagined that were I in this particular position I would maybe take such a photograph.

But that’s merely what words will do: they will affect us to see photographs in a specific fashion. It’s important not to lose sight of what matters, though: the first and foremost task at hand is to acknowledge the photographer’s hurt. Then, and only then, can one move on to imagining being in her place.

Scenes of Absence might appear to be a specific book about a specific situation (a Japanese woman taking care of her dying grandmother), but it’s really not. Caregiving is a task performed all over the world. All over the world it is gendered, whether it’s taking care of young children or of dying relatives. That father who decreed that “men just can’t do that” could be almost any man, even if the verbiage, of course, might vary. More often than not it falls on women to do the caring.

Seen that way, the absence in the title of the book also points at a larger absence in our societies: An almost complete absence of meaningful conversations around the duty of taking care of someone.

“It’s fine,” Ishiuchi Miyako, the grand dame of Japanese photography, says in a long conversation with Touyama Yuhki (I’m quoting from the machine translation; there is a short video with English subtitles that you want to watch), “as long as you keep taking pictures and don’t give up,” referring to photography’s ability to give solace to those who are in need of it. While Ishiuchi’s words specifically refer to a photographers, I think they extend outwards to viewers as well.

Things will be fine, we might conclude about any of the topics portrayed through photographs, as long as you keep looking at picture and don’t give up on looking the world, understanding what it ails, and on then making it a better place.

Recommended.

Scenes of Absence; photographs and text by Touyama Yuhki; 176 pages; Akaaka Art Publishing; 2024

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District

2025-03-03T13:24:20Z

“The photos took place in Kyiv before the full-scale invasion.” The weight of these words, a few pages after the final photograph in Vladyslav Andrievsky‘s District, are hard to assess for anyone not living in Ukraine, anyone not experiencing the daily threat of being torn to pieces by russian missiles, drones, or bombs.

To what extent my knowledge of the war influences my read of the book I can’t tell. Am I reading too much into these photographs taken from 2017 until 2022 when I claim that there is a pervasive feel of dread, of something not entirely benevolent that might happen at any moment?

Perhaps.

And yet, I maintain that what I see is real. I could pinpoint it in the photographs and their interplay, which, given the way visual books work, would be a lot easier to demonstrate by showing it in person than by writing about it.

Alas…

It feels flippant to compare attempting to find one’s footing as a young person with living in a country at war, even as youthful drama often yields the kinds of exaggerated situations that life under bombs will bring naturally.

But bombs might bring death while the drama of youth only brings disappointment — and maybe some hurt.

At its core, District centers on growing up among the large multi-story apartment buildings that are so pervasive in those regions of Europe that previously were under Soviet rule/occupation. Mass produced and cheaply built after World War 2, they served an immediate need for housing, and at least initially, they brought forms of comfort to places that had not had them before.

With time, however, their increasing dilapidation not only served as a metaphor for the system that had created them, it also brought daily misery to those forced to live inside them.

And their anonymity stood in the way of what young people strive for the most: a sense of belonging to a unique community, a sense of feeling seen (while not being seen too much).

District is filled with depictions of those buildings and their surfaces. It’s difficult not to imagine being among them on a cold day, with the wind howling and diversions being absent.

Seen that way, the book’s story (if we want to use that word) is one that is experienced all over the world and that could have been told anywhere.

I’m writing this not to diminish Andrievsky’s book in any way. Instead, and this is important to note a few days after the current US president and his lackeys betrayed Ukraine, we need to see the people living there in the same way we see our neighbours across the street: as human beings who are just as deserving of safety, protection, and our care as we are.

Their stories, in other words, are our stories as well, even if the details might differ. That young people growing up in banlieue (to use the French term that seems most well suited to describe what I’m after) all face the same struggle is worthwhile mentioning; of course, it’s only the ones in Ukraine (or Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere) who also live under the threat of death arriving anonymously from the skies.

District breaks with the conventions of telling such a story through its inclusion of a very smart detail. The bulk of the photographs are in black and white. But there is a small number of colour pictures: a view of the sky, with the sun coming out behind an impossibly dark cloud. The pictures appear to have been taken moments apart, and there is more and more sun.

More and more sun. It’s not clear whether the hooded figure who in the first photograph gazes towards apartment towers in the distance will notice it. But in the final picture in the book, his head has turned, and there are traces of a face to be seen.

District shows a gifted photographer at work, one of a number of young Ukrainians who now are slowly becoming more well known outside of their home country.

It’s a brooding book for all the reasons I outlined above, but who am I to tell a young person not to brood? (Especially since I’m still spending so much time brooding myself.)

Recommended.

Слава Україні!

District; photographs by Vladyslav Andrievsky; essay by Olha Pavlenko; 100 pages; Syntax contact; 2024

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Flächenland

2025-02-24T15:09:10Z

The really infuriating aspect of Stephanie Kiwitt’s Flächenland (2020-2022) is that it contains a really good photobook that’s hidden inside a pretty bad one. Here’s the thing: The challenge of photobook making is not to become too enarmored with one’s own cleverness. You have to trim away any signs of it so that the end result, the book, sings. Flächenland does not sing. Instead, it groans like a fatally wounded monstrous creature.

Flächenland is, as you might have guessed, a German word. It’s a term to describe German states that are not merely cities (such as Berlin, Hamburg, or Bremen). The state in question is called Sachsen-Anhalt. You might have never heard of this particular state, and, honestly, nobody, except possibly the locals, would blame you for it. Sachsen-Anhalt is roughly the size of the US state I live in (Massachusetts) or about the size of Slovenia.

The state lies in what used to be East Germany before the so-called reunification, meaning that in comparison to states in the west, it has one additional historical layer. But the idea of layers is somewhat misleading because unlike onions, countries tend to show all of their layers at the same time (even as some might be more prominent than others). You don’t have to peel one away to come across another.

At its core, the photographs in Flächenland concern themselves with these layers through their depiction of the built environment in Sachsen-Anhalt. It’s the type of photography that has a rich tradition, whether in Germany or elsewhere. It’s also the type of photography that’s easy to do but very hard to do well: anyone can take a photograph of a house, but few people — including Kiwitt — can do it at a level that the result is more than merely an exercise in form.

(I should probably add that I personally have an affinity for photography along the lines of Kiwitt’s work, even though I personally insist on the presence of the human form in my own work.)

The many small towns in Sachsen-Anhalt lend themselves to being surveyed in Kiwitt’s fashion because of the many traces of history ingrained in its buildings. Looking through the book, I was immediately familiar with a lot of what these buildings communicate.

As I noted, it’s difficult to do the work well, and I find it hard to describe how or why the good photographs in Flächenland are so good. That line between competent photography of the built environment and excellent photography of it is hard to cross and just as hard to define.

The book is filled with photographs of houses and streets, with any number of details thrown in. It’s photography in colour, but there is an enormous sense of grey drabness over everything on view. Where people appear in photographs, they do so accidentally.

The bulk of the book consists of spreads of four photographs in a grid of two on the left page and two on the right one. Typically (but not always), the photographs in a single spread are closely related, such as when four photographs might show variations of the same scene (produced by the camera moving around a space).

If the above sounds very didactic, then, yes, that’s already the first problem. Second, it’s not immediately clear how as a viewer you are supposed to read the grid. Do you go from top left to right and then from bottom left to right (as I have been doing), or do you go from top left to bottom and then from top right to bottom? Either way, this doesn’t solve the problem of the didacticism.

It’s a didacticism that’s entirely photographic. Which, I suppose, is fine if you’re into that kind of thing. Paul Graham famously engaged with it in almost all of his later work.

But the choice of a focus on the photographic causes the aforementioned burying of really fantastic photographs in a sea of mediocrity. I think that that’s a steep price to pay for a concept that simply is too clever by half.

In addition, given the book’s insistence to keep the different times (locations) when (where) the photographs were taken apart, whatever additional connections could have been made between them remain unused. Instead, there’s a long list of the names of cities and towns and hamlets at the beginning, and then the book proceeds to show you.

I’m writing these words the day before the 2025 federal elections in Germany. The far-right AfD party polls at around 20%, meaning one out of every five Germans will vote for a Nazi party. Obviously, people all over the world now vote for Nazi parties; but in Germany things hit differently (I shouldn’t have to explain why that is the case).

Furthermore, Sachsen-Anhalt is one of the hot spots of German contemporary fascism. The latest poll there has the AfD at 31%, just a single point behind the nominally conservative CDU party that over the past couple of years has been veering to the right, embracing many AfD talking points.

I’ve been following a lot of discussions online about Germany’s current politics and its sharp turn to the right. There appears to be a clear divide, with Germans living abroad (and non-Germans) being a lot more critical of what they’re observing than the Germans themselves.

Frankly, much like many outside observers, I am aghast at the general complacency with which Germans deal with the Nazi threat in their own midst.

I’m not necessarily of the opinion that photographers or artists have to feel compelled to make work around the political situation. Still, if you make a book about Sachsen-Anhalt, I simply fail to understand how you would embrace turning things into a photographic exercise while you drive through what increasingly are becoming no-go areas for larger parts of the population.

The thing is that with a much better edit it would have been very easy to work out some of that dreadful political atmosphere that is now making many Germans, especially those whose names are not Schmidt or Müller, question whether they really have a home in Germany. In addition, that book would also have more successfully looked a the layers of history in this particular German state.

Obviously, I can only talk about the book at hand, not the one that could have been. Still, what a missed opportunity!

Flächenland; photographs by Stephanie Kiwitt; texts by Jonathan Everts, Daniel Herrmann; 448 + 16 pages; Spector Books; 2023

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A Bright Room

2025-02-17T16:36:29Z

As is often the case with Japanese photobooks, Shingo Kanagawa‘s A Bright Room comes with a lot of Japanese text (here an essay that spans 26.5 pages) and a very brief English version of it. There is no way that anyone, however gifted they are, can cram those 26.5 pages into one and a half.

Given that my Japanese isn’t remotely advanced enough to read the longer essay, I used the translation app on my phone. But there’s a limit to what such translation can achieve with a language such as Japanese that omits a lot of context (incl. usually pronouns) and where the reading of individual characters can also vary. On their own, the translations of the 27 separate images made some sense; but combined, they did not add up the big picture I had been hoping for.

Long story short (just the facts from the English text), in 2019, Kanagawa started moving in with Aya Momose and Reiji Saito. “We were simply a woman and two men living together,” the English text says, “that Reiji and I got along well with each other; and that we all lived together as friends and equal partners.” Simply — not quite so, as becomes clear from both texts, but in particular from the Japanese one (or rather the fragments I received from my translation app).

I would love to have a full, good translation of the Japanese text. This is not because I need it to understand the photographs; it’s simply that what little I was granted access to has me convinced that in its own right, it would make for very good reading. As it stands, though, I am left with the fragments and, of course, the photographs.

If you’re wondering why I am obsessing over the texts so much, it’s because I started out with the photographs. I always do. When given photographs to look at, I will always ignore the text first, unless it is clear that it is an integral part of the work. Photographers, well Western ones anyway, tend to be rather bad at using text: they always want to explain way too much, and they usually desire to too radically narrow down a viewer’s access to their work (let’s not even get started on the ones that produce International Art English).

My approach is guided by the experience that if a photographer’s work is good, it will withstand the assault produced by bad text. And if it is not good, there’s nothing text can salvage or ruin anyway.

Regardless, in A Bright Room the photographs come first, and they’re sequenced in the order in which they were taken (the dates are listed underneath each one of them). These days, “narrative” is all the rage in photoland. There is none here; but there is so much happening, even though there aren’t really any events taking place.

Most of the photographs in the book show either Kanagawa and/or Momose and/or Saito. It’s a rather casual mix of photographic approaches, with snapshots mingling with spontaneous or orchestrated (self-)portraits (and a variety of cameras, including a smartphone). And yet the whole is incredibly coherent in a truly intriguing fashion.

As is always the case with very good photography, the moment the viewer closes the book it asks for it to be revisited: you want to look again. If you maybe want to imagine a contemporary version of Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency that excludes any of the harsher moments from the famous work and only focuses on three people (well, four, at some stage a third man enters the — pardon the pun — picture), you will get a good idea of the emotional weight of the book.

Much like in Goldin’s book, there is an enormous amount of trust, affection, and care between those behind the camera and in front of it. The trust, affection, and care exist between all parties. But you can also see its weight shifting. By that I don’t mean any drastic shifts. It’s just that there are adjustments in the closeness in the three pairs in the constellation.

“I believe the reason I want to be with other people,” Kanagawa writes (in the English text), “is because of a deep loneliness somewhere inside of me. The loneliness I mean is a strong longing to share what I think and feel with another person, an inability to keep these things locked up inside me.” (machine translation of the same quote from the Japanese version of the bookseller’s page about the book produces: “The loneliness I am talking about here is the yearning for someone to receive what I feel and think, rather than just keeping it to myself.”)

Having looked through the book, I had trouble connecting what I saw with loneliness. As someone who knows feelings of loneliness very well, it is certainly not my attention to question the author’s use of the word (さみしさ in the Japanese original). It’s just that in the photographs, I don’t see a lonely person either before or behind the camera.

Instead, I see someone with enormous sensitivity to the weight of human life and to the value of every individual person; again, this had me think of Nan Goldin.

I’m writing these words while there is an all-out assault on both the weight of human life and the value of every individual person by the newly elected government of my adopted home country; a fact that, no doubt, shadows my read of this book.

This is not to say that the book should be seen in this light — it’s a Japanese book after all, and things play out very differently there than in the US (even as in Japan, the rights of same-sex partners are not guaranteed, either).

But for sure, beyond the enormous sensitivity with which Kanagawa has recorded the people he has been living with, despite its very nuanced and quiet voice, A Bright Room very powerfully affirms the rights and value of every human being, regardless of where or how they position themselves in intimate relationships with others.

All of this combines to a masterpiece of a book whose seemingly understated nature reveals deep tenderness and care for the human condition.

If I had just one wish to voice, it would be for someone to produce and publish a translation of the longer Japanese text in the book. I’m longing to read more than merely the disjointed fragments produced by machine translation with its random names and pronouns.

Highly recommended.

A Bright Room; photographs and text by Shingo Kanagawa; 152 pages; Fugensha; 2024

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Anima Mundi

2025-02-10T13:22:15Z

For the longest time, humans have collected and sorted and organized entities to make sense of the world, whether physical or abstract ones. Not surprisingly, ever since it was invented photography has become an essential part of this endeavour: where pictures themselves aren’t the entities to be collected, sorted, and organized they have been produced to provides visual aids. This has become such an obvious facet of our daily lives that we don’t even realize its presence any longer.

By construction, photobooks are sorted and organized collections of photographs. Given that the purposes of most photobooks extend beyond this basic aspect, we hardly ever notice. And in many cases where that purpose does not extend any further, it usually becomes such an essential part of the work in question that there is no need to question it — or expect more.

For example, nobody in their right mind (well, we’ll come back to this) would expect a photobook by Bernd and Hilla Becher to be anything a very dry collection of monotonously photographed industrial installations. The point is exactly that: through the accumulation of things that look very similar (whether in real life or in photographs) their internal characteristics are exposed, and they are revealed as “anonymous sculptures”.

Of course, someone a little bit less enarmoured with art hierarchies might find the Bechers’ life work to be good but lacking, given that its understanding of the word “sculpture” is rather limited. Those collections do their job and, I’m told, a lot of people do not find them as dreadfully boring as I do. I don’t mean the good boredom, the one that opens the senses; I mean the kind of boredom you experience, say, when you have a long international flight, you barely got any sleep, and there are those 30 minutes to spend before the landing: your senses have become almost fully dulled.

I don’t mean to argue that the Bechers’ life work isn’t art; it’s just that I personally prefer art to take me to a point where I wonder “what if?”, where, in other words, I see the world anew — instead of marveling over some mundane details of a world that isn’t that exciting to begin with. (Your mileage might vary.)

Maybe it is my background in the sciences that has me ask artists for more than a mere collection of facts (let’s call it that). As a scientist, that’s what I was doing: collecting facts and coming to the only conclusions that were supported by those facts. There’s nothing wrong with that; but with time I found it wanting, especially since it put a limit on what I think of as my creativity.

Thus, now I want artists to get me more: as I already noted above, I want them to make me imagine something that’s not supported by the facts, or maybe something that’s supported by the facts albeit in a fashion that has me reconsider what I thought I knew.

It’s along these lines that Máté Bartha‘s Anima Mundi operates. Designed very attractively by Carel Fransen, the book is an exercise in making sense of the world through patterns either observed in it or placed onto it (design, of course, is information of visual material towards an end: communication).

Here, it mostly relies on a pattern of eight square-shaped boxes on each page, into which photographs are being filled. The individual photographs either fill a square, or they might fill a larger number. Where they fill four, they might be presented as four individual segments, or they are shown as a whole (but slightly smaller than the grid of four).

None of this would work if many of the photographs themselves did not depict patterns: the fragmentation of information serves to re-shuffle what is on view and its accumulation hints at a logic that might or might not be one we are not familiar with. I suppose this latter part strongly depends on who the viewer is; someone trained in the sciences might experience this book very differently than someone who is not.

(Which fact of course might make me the wrong person to write a review of this book. But now that I have started the job I will finish it.)

Without the inclusion of photographs of the human form, Anima Mundi would be a dreadful affair. Thankfully, there are quite a few of them, including a number of pictures of two hands used to form what might be symbols of some kind. Meaning, this says, is being communicated here and in what follows. What that meaning might be is up for the viewer to find out.

In many ways, you could view the book as a fairly representative example of a lot of work that is being made these days. It’s cerebral and very well made (I don’t mean “cerebral” as a criticism), and it talks about a bigger loose scheme while ignoring all the very concrete ones that surround us (and that I do mean as a criticism).

At some stage, photographers collectively will have to decide whether re-arranging the pixels of the deck chairs on the Titanic really passes the test of our times. Then again, Bartha lives under the Orbán regime in Hungary, so my comments are really directed at all those photographers who are still able to enjoy their civic and artistic freedom.

With that said, Anima Mundi certainly is one of the best recent photobooks that operates around the idea of (loosely) using the scientific method to make us re-consider the world. Looking through the book makes for an interesting experience: with some photographs, I felt that seeing them only in the grid made them lose some of their inherent value. But with others, it was the exact opposite.

Which only proves that when it comes to the photobook, the only thing that matters is the whole — and not the constituent parts. And that’s more or less the point of the book as well, even as it’s not announced what that whole might be: it’s up to the viewer to create it in their head.

Anima Mundi; photographs by Máté Bartha; essays by Emese Musci and Paul Dijstelberge; 136 pages; The Eriskay Connection; 2024

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Pestka

2025-02-03T13:36:13Z

One of the most underdiscussed aspects of photography is the role played by the way they look. Possibly, this is because photography was invented the wrong way around. In a perfect world, the first photographs would have been in colour, and they would have portrayed the world faithfully. With time, a select few photographers would have then introduced different approaches.

The first photographer to have produced black-and-white images no doubt would have faced a lot of backlash, but she would have insisted on the value of seeing the world in this fashion. Black and white would have slowly caught on, as more photographers would have started to understand what you can do when you remove colour from a picture.

Unfortunately, photography started out with the strangest of monochrome images — oddly disembodied specters floating on the surfaces of mirrors. Relatively shortly after, these got replaced with photographs on paper. But the presence of these life-like images — so different from anything produced before — had people mostly forget about their monochrome nature.

As more photographic materials became available (better lenses as much as different chemistries and types of paper), more options arose for the production of photographs. And there were some early discussions around what photographs ought to look like. Sadly, those neglected the medium at hand and, instead, circled around how or whether to place photography into the larger context of art.

Even as the photographs produced by, say, the pictorialists and the f64 group couldn’t look any more different, their underlying pre-occupation was identical: photography have to look a certain way. And this insistence concerning what photographs would have to look like would continue to this day, without a deeper understanding of what all of this might mean.

Once digital image-making tools came with filters — custom-made settings that allows for the instant creation of a specific look — the window closed fully: amateurs might have to rely on those cheap tools to make their photographs look a certain way. But we, the denizens of the exalted world of photography are doing so much better.

Well, are we?

What a photograph looks like mostly gets discussed in usually the crudest terms when it becomes extreme, such as when William Klein or Daido Moriyama embrace a form of black and white that pushes away all the midtones and, instead, settled for extremes.

Or when photographs look different enough in a fashion that they allow us to attach relatively shallow misconceptions to them, such as when Westerners try to connect Rinko Kawauchi’s photographs to their maker’s Japaneseness (“the Japanese see the world differently” — the form of Orientalism that still is so common).

The reality is that what a photograph looks like forms an integral part of how it reads. It’s important to understand the relationship between form (to use that term) and resulting interpretation. Especially when what a photograph looks like commands a lot of attention we should force ourselves to dive deeper — instead of staying on the easy surface (this is especially important given that we live under an attention economy that is being exploited by fascists for their nefarious ends).

I’ve spent so much time on the above simply because without a heightened awareness of this particular aspect of photography you’re likely to remain on that surface when looking at Magdalena Wywrot‘s Pestka.

Given our attention economy, it’s likely that you have seen some of the photographs already: it’s the kind of photography that, much like Moriyama’s, is great for online presentations: it’s bold, it’s (pardon the pun) flashy, it’s high contrast.

But you do the work a huge disservice if you remain at that level, because a relationship between a mother and a daughter (actually between any two people who are close) deserves to be seen with an eye for the many nuances entailed in a life shared that inevitably will enter the photographs.

Any person who becomes a parent experiences the parent-child relationship for the second time in their life. During the first time, they’re the child, and as they grow they start to fill out and form the their own personality that in part will be set up in opposition to their parents’. The second time around, the table has turned: now, there is another small person who goes through the same process.

It’s difficult to disentangle the former from the latter.

We don’t actually know to what extent what we see in the photographs in Pestka reflects the daughter’s personality. After all, she’s not the one who has her hand on the camera’s shutter button. We could try to make assumptions about the possible relationship between mother and daughter. But in all likelihood those assumptions would only reflect what we want to see — instead of what is actually there.

Alternatively, we could ask the people involved. I’m not interested in that, either, because whatever they might say closes off the work in very specific ways. The beauty of photography is not that it faithfully represents what its makers want it to do (if that’s all there were to it, it would be really boring). The beauty of photography is that it has the potential to make us feel something in unforeseeable ways.

I found myself drawn to mostly the least visually dramatic photographs in this book, because it was there that I felt I was getting glimpses of that independent mind in front of her mother’s camera. This is not to imply that Wywrot was doing anything wrong; it’s just that for me, portraiture lives from what a photographer cannot control.

In those photographs, I noticed a lot of seeing, a lot of different ways in which this young woman dealt with seeing and being seen. The innocence of looking (by which I mean a child’s not knowing that in social contexts, you can never just innocently look at something or someone) is slowly replaced by an awareness of the power of looking.

Looking means exercising a form of power, whereas being looked at does not.

The camera does that, too, of course, but it does it differently.

And it is exactly this growing awareness of looking, of seeing and being seen, that for me provides the intriguing red thread through this book that, alas, is a little bit too eager to sacrifice some of the work’s nuances for sheer spectacle. I just wish that there were more space in the book, that the edit would not try so hard to hit you over the head every time you turn the page.

“A sequence of photographs in a book is an invitation to imagine,” David Campany, the writer and curator (now Creative Director at ICP, that bastion of traditionalism in US photography), writes in the afterword of the book he edited. I wish he had followed his own advice.

After all, when photographs visually evoke the nervous energy of, say, William Klein’s pictures from New York, the temptation is to re-create that nervous energy. You can do that with Moriyama’s pictures, but I don’t think that you want to do it with Wywrot’s. Because sometimes, you have to resist such a temptation: for some photographs, such as the ones here, it only ends up closing off too many possible ways to approach them.

Thus, a viewer will have to do a little bit of extra work with the book to discover the many nuances in the work, some of whom are hidden away underneath a lot of spectacle. It’s work, but there are plenty of rewards.

Pestka; photographs and text by Magdalena Wywrot; text by David Campany; 149 pages; Deadbeat Club; 2024

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between the skin and sea

2025-01-26T16:40:37Z

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 Rest Is Memory

2025-01-20T15:23:49Z

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

Photographers After Social Media

2025-01-13T13:07:11Z

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.)

Ambience Decay

2025-01-06T13:40:49Z

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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Sophie Calle: Oversharing

2024-12-23T13:47:28Z

Something curious happened a few days before I received Sophie Calle’s Overshare, the catalogue of a recent retrospective of the French artist’s work. Describing Voir La Mer to a group of photographers, I told them that Calle had brought people who had never seen the ocean to it so that they may see it for the first time. But, I said, she had only filmed (or photographed) them from the back. A viewer would have to imagine this particular moment in these strangers’ lives. Alas, Overshare showed me, I had misremembered Calle’s art piece; or maybe I had tweaked it mentally towards what I would have shown. Instead, after Calle’s subjects had faced — and seen — the ocean, at the artist’s request they had turned towards the camera so that we, the artwork’s viewers, would see their faces (meaning their eyes).

Thinking about this seemingly inconsequential episode, it seems to me that what I had misremembered was not so much one of Sophie Calle’s minor pieces (your mileage might vary). Instead, I had put my own interpretation of this artist onto it. Calle’s work has been very, very dear to me for many years, and I have spent a lot of time with it.

In her introductory essay, curator Henriette Huldisch writes how Calle has had to fight with what male artists never had to contend with. While, for example, writer Karl Ove Knausgård’s generous (and if you ask me completely insufferable and self-indulgent) oversharing has never counted as anything other than major literature (even as that writer’s seemingly endless revelations of life details end up being an exercise in vapid form: so many books, so many pages), for women artists such as Calle that process has not been quite as easy at all, with frequent criticism leveled at what to many people (for all the wrong reasons) did or does not look like art.

I could see how my misremembering might be seen as yet another older guy seeing a woman artist’s work in the wrong light. And yet, I will contend that my misremembering was instead fueled by my familiarity with Sophie Calle’s best pieces. While oversharing can be seen as being an essential aspect of the French artist’s work, to see it as just that or, maybe more precisely, to end the discussion right there runs the risk of missing the key characteristic of her work. After all, there is a reason why Sophie Calle is considered to be one of contemporary art’s most poignant practitioners while the stars of today’s (and by now yesterday’s) reality-TV shows are not: very crucially, Calle’s sharing stops where the real hurt begins. In contrast, in reality-TV shows, the hurt is spread out for all to witness, typically with gratuitously overscripted neoliberal solutions added at the end. Reality TV might be TV, but it has nothing to do with the reality we experience in our lives.

The point of most of Calle’s works is not so much what is being shown — as revealing as it might be. For example, inviting strangers to sleep in your bed while photographing them is transgressive in some ways (even though in the age of AirBnB and the discovery of hidden cameras, that transgressiveness has faded considerably). However, the point of The Sleepers is that the feelings that might arise — and this is where Calle’s work and reality TV depart radically — are being left to imagine. In other words, what makes most of Sophie Calle’s work so radically emotionally potent is not a revelation, however far it might go, but instead the frustration of a viewer’s desire for the painful or deeply emotional moments to be resolved. And that’s exactly why I was so disappointed to see the faces of the people who had seen the ocean for the first time.

Sophie Calle’s art thus is life, our daily life, a life that unlike reality TV is not lived around the same repeating script. For all of us, The show will be over at some point. But we won’t know whether there will be the beautiful resolution just in time or a cliffhanger (that, granted, we will not be around to deal with any longer). Chances are that some things will simply not be resolved. Put bluntly, Monique, Sophie Calle’s mother who was reported to have proclaimed “Finally!” when she became her daughter’s subject on her deathbed, is not around any longer to see the piece.

There is a distinct and at time very strong red thread of transgressiveness in Calle’s work. It’s not in all pieces, but it shines through over the years. Sophie Calle always wants to know more about someone than what might be “proper”. This is interesting, because what actually is proper often is not clearly defined. To give a completely unrelated example, when I went to Japan, a few strangers told me things I would have never dared ask them about (in fact, even in the US, asking friends about them would have been not straightforward). But there was no risk for these strangers, because I was one, too. And not only that, I also was an outsider, someone completely outside of the norms they had to live with. To paraphrase a different idea, what is proper is proper until it is no more.

Throughout the years, Sophie Calle has subjected strangers to her unbounded curiosity, whether with their consent or not. Inevitably, the ethics of doing it enter immediately. It’s one thing to invite strangers to tell you a secret to then bury it (or hide it in a safe). It’s quite another to find someone’s address book and to then not only call the people contained therein but to also write about it in a newspaper. In the end, this approach is testing a viewer’s/reader’s boundaries: how far would I go? What do I feel is proper?

Unfortunately, with ethics being ethics and strong feelings seeking an outlet, Calle has opened up herself to quite a bit of abuse. A male artist might have got away with the address-book idea more easily than a female one (there is, after all, that rather primitive idea of male bravado). Henriette Huldisch discusses this aspect at length in her essay.

This is not to say that all of Calle’s projects were ethically solid (the artist appeared to have realized as much after The Address Book). Yet, I maintain that there is much to be gained from probing the boundaries of what is proper, in particular when you include yourself in the work. I feel that this aspect or art making is criminally underdiscussed in the world of photography, where too many photographers too strongly believe in their privilege as the person in charge of the camera.

As a brief aside, this does not mean that including yourself automatically makes work OK. For example, Antoine d’Agata’s work will forever be tainted by the artist’s broken moral compass, regardless of how many times the photographer puts himself in front of his camera.

The key to probing boundaries is to be aware of them and to be aware of the transgression. This entails acknowledging other people, and it involves empathy (d’Agata’s work is failing on all counts here). For me, Calle’s work is strongest where transgressiveness and empathy both play a very important role. Where one is noticeably absent, things don’t quite take off — or they take the wrong turn. That’s why, for example, The Sleepers is so much stronger (in all kinds of ways) than The Address Book.

But is there a Sophie Calle? Is it a good idea to treat the person behind the many different bodies of work as the exact same person (as I did when I thought about Voir La Mer)? Or rather, can we distinguish different phases (if we want to use that word) in this artist’s career that might differ from each other — and if yes, what might those differences be?

Overshare solves that riddle through chapters (“The Spy”, “The Protagonist”, “The End”, “The Beginning”), which does the trick — or rather a trick. The problem with organizing an artist’s work through their artistic strategies is that you introduce a strong reductive element into things. Obviously, for an exhibition to work you will need some organization, especially if an audience (here in Minnesota) might not be very familiar with the artist in question. (If Tim Waltz was right with his “mind your own damn business” spiel, the Minnesota audience will experience the very opposite of it.)

Still, I feel that the rather simplistic chapters undermine some of the spirit of Sophie Calle’s work, larger parts of which were done with that wink towards the people whose lives were being put under a microscope — and towards the audience that simultaneously is told that they’re in on the joke, while somehow being made to feel uneasy about that very fact.

Regardless, while I stopped maintaining the illusion that the world of photography (outside of her native France) will suddenly realize how much Sophie Calle has to offer, there still is that shimmer of hope. And here’s a new book, a very nice overview with some essential pieces, some well known, others less so. You might as well have a look!

Sophie Calle: Overshare; edited with text by Henriette Huldisch; text by Mary Ceruti, Eugenie Brinkeman, Aruna D’Souza, Courtenay Finn; 200 pages; Walker Art Center; 2024

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Fault Lines

2024-12-09T13:24:55Z

Ever since Vaterland, my first photobook, I have been following the rise and spread of neofascism in Europe and beyond. Since my book was published, anti-democratic forces in Germany have more than doubled their vote share while democratic parties have adopted far-right talking points. It’s probably fair to say that the left as a political power has become irrelevant, and most democratic parties offer some variant of conservative policies. The social-democratic West Germany I was born into has now become a historical oddity, as the country’s dominant political class has morphed into a feckless, ruthlessly neoliberal clique.

It is only its history that differentiates Germany from the rest of Europe. Neoliberalism has swept across the continent, and it has brought about a sharp rise in neofascist parties everywhere. Prabhat Patnaik wrote a concise article about the relationship between neoliberalism and neofascism. He argues that there is a conflict between them that might rupture things eventually. But that’s hardly a consolation for all those who are swept up under neofascist, illiberal regimes.

In 2023, I had the opportunity to travel to Budapest again. Under Viktor Orbán rule, Hungary has been transformed into the closest equivalent of Vladimir Putin’s Russia in the European Union (if you don’t believe me, maybe this article will set you straight: “Today, Hungary is a flourishing dictatorship.”). Of course, I had to bring my camera to loosely continue the work I had done with Vaterland.

After all, almost everywhere you go in Europe, you will stumble across traces of the devastation wrought by Nazi Germany. I wanted to pick up on some of those traces, knowing full well that up until 1944, Hungary was actually allied with Nazi Germany.

Furthermore, as Jason Stanley outlines in Erasing History, neofascist rulers have a particular interest in re-defining their nation’s history. This inevitably involves making the nation “great again” by erasing everything that stands in the way of that supposed greatness.

Photography is great for such work because you don’t need much more than surfaces. History is told through surfaces — and erasure. Erasure leaves holes and gaps, and you can train your camera on those as well. In general, the more furiously a regime is trying to re-define its nation’s history, the more traces you will find.

At the same time, while I could have made work around on the role of history for the neofascist project, that idea felt incomplete to me. It also did not feel right: I did not want to tell Hungarians’ story. Other photographers might not have any problems with that, and I certainly do not want to imply any judgment on them for their choices.

After all, the story of neofascism is always also the story of the people who have to live under it. In part, my thinking might be informed by trying to find out for years what Germans such as my grandparents were thinking while they were living in Nazi Germany. Books such as Svetlana Alexievich‘s also left a deep mark in my psyche: they’re most filled with narrations by ordinary people, and it is the steady accumulation of minute details that fills out the larger picture.

So I decided that I would seek out Hungarian people and have them talk about their country. I put out a call on Instagram: if you’re Hungarian, will you talk to me about your country? A number of people offered their time, and I am intensely grateful to them: Judith Gellér, Milos Kallai, Domonkos Németh, Ákos Polgárdi, Andi Schmied, and Liza Szabó.

For these conversations, I prepared a small number of very broad and simple questions, and people told me what they felt they needed to tell me. Later, I went through the collections of texts, and I extracted parts that I then assembled into a text that runs parallel to the photographs in what became Fault Lines, my new photobook or rather image-text book. I also added a few quotes by Hungarian leaders (who much like all neofascists have always been very open about their motivations).

I am also very grateful to the photography students who kindly allowed me to take their portraits: Daniella Grinberg, Anna Gajewsky, Laura Virág Szekeres, Tamara Süle, Hunor Tóth, and Andris Turi. And of course, I am grateful to Hungarian photographers Arion Gabór Kudász, Gábor Máté, Peter Puklus, Krisztina Erdei, and Ábel Szalontai who spoke with me about photography, their country, Hungarian wine, and much more.

Even though the following isn’t part of my book, I believe that it is worthwhile pointing it out: for such a small country, Hungary has had an outsized influence on the history of photography. Major names include Brassaï (born Gyula Halász), Robert Capa (born Endre Ernő Friedmann; who for better or worse became maybe the role model of the dashing photojournalist), André Kertész, and László Moholy-Nagy (who defined photographic modernity to an extent unmatched by anyone else).

Actually, there is a connection with an aspect in my book: they all left Hungary and attained their fame elsewhere.

Just like my first book, Fault Lines was published by Kerber Verlag. You can get a copy either through them, a friendly bookseller, or you can get a copy directly from me (if you’re interested, send me an email: jmcolberg@gmail.com). I have a lot of copies for sale, so please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Our Lonely Selves

2024-12-02T13:32:13Z

“The prize celebrates the vital work of translators, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and the translator,” the website of the International Booker Prize announces. For anyone who is able to speak and read more than one language, such a prize makes perfect sense, given that languages differ in any number of ways. Nuance, for example, is expressed very differently in English and Japanese. Good translation will make sure that nuances expressed differently in different languages will not get lost.

Even though I think that for all kinds of reasons photography prizes need to be abolished (they only serve to re-enforce neoliberal ideas, and that’s not even going into the issue of conflicts of interest), I find it interesting to entertain the equivalent of the International Booker Prize for photobooks. There, the roles of author and translator would be occupied by the photographer and the person who conceptualizes the book.

It might seem strange to think of making a photobook from photographs as a translation. There are books for which that translation mostly does not matter; as I’ve argued here for years, these books are mostly not very interesting at all. For most books, though, careful thinking has to be employed to fit the work in question into the relatively limited form of a book.

Done well, a photobook becomes its own work of art that stands on equal footing next to its source photographs. This fact is most obvious where at first the differences between the book and the photographs are enormous.

If you take the work of Awoiska van der Molen, the photographs have a commanding presence. By that I do not want to refer to their sizes, even though scale might play a role. Instead, it is the complex interplay of very careful studio work with the imagery itself that has an effect on viewers.

In fact, when in the presence of Van der Molen’s prints, Walter Benjamin’s talking point of a loss of aura, given the “mechanical reproduction”, makes little sense. The Marxist might have simply confused objects with what they communicate, a mistake he might not have made had he ever found himself faced with, say, a Carleton Watkins print.

When a book is made from such work, the translation into that format is crucial. You could attempt to make as large an object as possible to replicate the scale (and luxury aspect of the whole affair). But that approach treats the book as little more than a necessary evil. Instead, a bookmaker will have to try to replicate a viewer’s experience.

With Hans Gremmen, the designer and producer behind FW:Books, Van der Molen found her perfect bookmaking partner, a person uniquely capable of coming up with perfect translations. Ever since Sequester, published ten years ago, Gremmen has been producing books for this photographer.

Sequester and most of the work since has dealt with landscapes or rather with being immersed in a landscape. The specifics of the various locations in which the photographs had been taken in were of no concern for the artist or her viewers. Instead, the photographs centered on the sublime.

Van der Molen’s newest work, entitled The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves (a most clunky and unfortunate title), is less of a departure from the earlier landscapes than it might seem at first. After all, the photographer’s work does not concern itself much with what it shows; instead, it centers on what it makes a viewer feel. The feelings when confronted with those eerie, dark landscapes and these brightly illuminated, yet oddly mute windows lit up at night are very much identical.

None of the windows allow for looking in. There is the frequent presence of frosted glass, and there are curtains. It would be difficult to imagine an artist who spent so much time escaping to foreboding landscapes to suddenly develop an interest in peeking into people’s lives anyway. Sure, there are traces of those lives. But given the abstractions created by circumstances as much as the camera, these traces dissolve into abstractions.

We all want to belong. And yet…

Our Lonely Selves was first exhibited as a set of carbon prints (which I did not have the opportunity to see). Carbon prints have their own characteristics that are difficult to explain if you have never seen one. And again, how would this be translated into the book?

Careful printing would have to be of the order to get at the essence of carbon prints, and that means the right combination of paper and the layering of inks upon it. While Sequester alternated details of individual images with complete ones, this particular book remains at the level of the photographs. There would not have been a reason to zoom in to show details from large prints.

Zooming in would feel inappropriate anyway, given that as a viewer, you’re made to linger outside of someone’s home in the dark. This is where the work acquires its own edge. After all, why are you there? Why would the photographer wait outside strangers’ people’s homes (in a country far away no less) to then put her viewers into her place in a gallery or their home?

Many of the photographs are rather similar, which only serves to underscore the variations encountered: the different items whose contours are delineated and the implications that can be derived for their owners. And the viewing is ultimately frustrated anyway, because the accumulation of all of those contours does not add up to anything.

You end up traveling to a country far away to look and look and look out, only to realize that it’s within yourself that there’s more looking to be done.

You cannot escape your own loneliness, however hard you try.

You cannot shake it in any of those sweltering summer nights.

I suppose that with words someone else might have manged to achieve some of what Awoiska van der Molen achived here (Olga Tokarczuk comes to mind, in particular Flights). But words seek out being resolved in ways that photographs are unable to.

Photography’s dumb muteness will always prevent it from being fully resolved.

And in the hands of the most talented photographers, that’s a huge gift.

The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves; 56 pages | Leporello with 16 page insert; FW:Books; 2024

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Splinter

2024-11-25T13:49:12Z

Every once in a while, a reminder is overdue that photography does best what, well, it does best. It’s shocking to see how often photographers feel the need to dress up their wares by comparing their pictures with other media (“painterly”, “poetic”, …). Ignoring the question which paintings they actually refer to — Titian’s, Rothko’s? — or what exactly “poetic” is supposed to mean, it’s weird to observe a medium that is as insecure about itself as photography frequently is.

This is not even to say that photography only does one thing. If you wanted to summarize painting, you would have to describe it as people attaching pigments to surfaces in order to try to get at that medium’s sheer wealth of expression. The same is true for photography: it’s people creating what look like opto-mechanical images that might or might not have been created with the help of a lens.

But there are some things photography is simply especially well suited for. This includes the capture of fragments of life in very short moments of time, an activity that freezes those moments, and those caught in them, forever. For Henri Cartier-Bresson, this approached formed photography’s truest expression, and it has remained with us as the so-called decisive moment.

The problem with that concept — as with any other concept in photography — is that it’s one thing to satisfy the criteria. But it’s quite another to do it in such a fashion that the outcome is more than merely an exercise. In other words, the decisive moment will not give you great pictures. As you see in Cartier-Bresson’s work, it will mostly give you good pictures.

What is usually missing from discussions of the decisive moment is the fact that art does not derive from the application of opto-mechanical principles alone. For true art to arise, the person pressing the shutter button will have to bring something unquantifiable to it, something that cannot be summarized with a few words. The viewer’s wonder, in other words, is not contingent on the application of a formula.

Instead, photographs can only communicate passion, wit, and/or excitement if the person behind the camera is equipped with passion, wit, and/or excitement — possibly the decisive moment be damned (just look at John Baldessari’s photography to get an idea what I’m talking about).

Ever since I first saw Ela Polkowska‘s Splinter, I had been waiting for the book, which now has been published. Ela is one of those photographers who somehow managed to carve out her own little, easy recognizable niche. You’ll simply recognize one her pictures immediately the moment you see it. To describe only the technique — the compositions, the use of flash — would not get at the wit communicated by them.

In a number of places on the internet, Splinter is described as being “a story of people living in continuous disorder” (for example here). I get it, we all have to succinctly describe our pictures somehow so that curators can file things away in their mental filing cabinets. But honestly (and I don’t mean to offend whoever came up with that description), if you forget all about the words and simply enjoy the photographs, you’re going to be in a much better position.

While there is a vaguely Eastern European feel to some of the environs Ela photographed in (this might not be surprising, given that the photographer who now resides in Sweden originally is from Poland), what you’re looking at is less the story of some people as these visual gems she unearthed with her camera. It is as if this photographer were to tell us that good pictures can be found everywhere: you just have to pay enough attention.

Many of Ela’s pictures work so well because they squeeze that one thing so tightly into their frames. In this photographer’s vision, a sandwich that was made with hyperprocessed meat with what might or might not be ketchup added and that’s sitting on a surface that has not been cleaned in a million years turns into a good picture because the sandwich gets so much focus. There really only is the sandwich in all of its “glory”, a disgusting sight for anyone who has even only a remote awareness of healthy food. But it’s a really good picture because that’s all you’re getting as the viewer (thankfully, you won’t have to digest the sandwich itself).

In general, there is an intriguing simplicity that governs these pictures. Simplicity, of course, is good. Anyone can try to make a really complicated photograph; but have you ever tried to make a really simple picture and do it well?

Splinter is suffused with a really charming sense of playfulness. Crucially, at no stage of looking through the book do you feel as if the photographer were making fun of the people in front of her camera. If anything, everybody appears to be in on the joke, even if there might never have been a discussion around what might be going on once the camera enters the game.

There is no snark (or any of the other nasty sentiments) that so often pop up when photographers bring their cameras to people and places where a viewer might infer a difference in class and/or economic well being. I find that particular aspect of the work especially welcome.

However, what really sets Splinter apart from so much other work made today is the fact that for me as a viewer, there is a visceral experience when I look at the pictures. I can feel the pinch in the old man’s nose by the child’s hand. I smell the animals, and I feel the warmth of the light on my skin.

Recommended.

Splinter; photographs by Ela Polkowska; 68 pages; Blackbook Publications; 2024

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The long sunset: Daidō Moriyama’s Record

2024-11-18T12:47:07Z

It’s fair to note that Daidō Moriyama’s photography have found their true expression through print publications. The same can be said for many other Japanese photographers, given that in Japan the gallery system did not play the role it did in the West. For a while Moriyama even maintained his own private gallery, entitled Camp.

Camp existed during the years when Moriyama’s own photography appeared to be on the back burner. After his initial flurry of publications, some of them directly connected with the short-lived and influential Provoke group, starting in the mid 1970s until the late 1980s, there is a curious gap in many biographies of this photographer, which, unfortunately, has resulted in Camp not being as well known as it ought to be.

As a brief aside, given the crass neoliberal turn the commercial world of art photography has taken in the West, the idea of Camp has much to offer for photographers today who can’t find their place at the table where the crumbs dropped by the wealthy are being distributed.

In 1972, Moriyama published the first issue of a magazine he called Kiroku (or Record in English, which I will use from now on). “I would like to create a certain tension or antagonism between myself as portrayed in other media and myself as portrayed here in Record,” he wrote in that issue. There were four more issues, and then Record stopped — until it was revived in 2006, following a suggestion by Akio Nagasawa, an acquaintance of Moriyama’s.

“I was addressing myself rather than other people,” Moriyama wrote in issue number 6 about the past, “I wanted a simple, basic title. Sadly, Kiroku ended with the fifth issue. Production costs had doubled in the wake of the seventies oil crisis. I can’t deny that I was also a bit tired of the project.”

A selection of work from the first 30 issues of Record was published in 2017 (Moriyama’s quotes are taken from the book). A second selection, from issues 31 up to 50, has now been published as Record 2.

Both books were edited by Mark Holborn. In a nutshell, while Record contains occasional reproductions of spreads from the magazines (an approach well known from the various books about photobooks), in both books you get parts of the magazines reproduced (all in full bleed), alongside translations of the short introductory texts written by Moriyama.

If you wanted to think about the various issues of Record as a zine, I suppose you could. As far as I understand it, the term zine contains an element of setting things apart: whether it’s their makers proclaiming that they’re not part of the crowd or the crowd proclaiming that, well, those are zines (pronounced in a fashion that evokes the mental image of one’s fingers touching something unsavory).

It might seem a little bit strange to consider one of the most well known Japanese photographers as a zine maker. But if you look at Moriyama’s career, there certainly are many occasions of him brushing against the grain, whether as part of Provoke, as driving Camp, or his various approaches to making his own books. Someone who published a book entitled Bye-Bye Photography for sure wasn’t trying to play it safe.

Alternatively, you could view Record as coming closest to a form of diaristic photography. After all, the 20 issues contained in Record 2 cover the six-year time period from April 2016 until March 2022, meaning that there were roughly three issues every year.

These contain a mix of material, with some issues focusing on the by now familiar photo walks (“I crisscross the central Tokyo area, taking pictures almost daily.” — Record 34) or others produced during trips abroad to attend to an exhibition or prize ceremony (“Last November, while Paris Photo was on, I went to Paris for the first time in two years for business connected with the fair.” — Record 40).

But there also are occasions for Moriyama to look back and to reminisce, and it is these in which the emotions manage to break through what clearly has become the routine of essentially taking the same kinds of pictures over and over and over: “In early November I had some business to do in the town of Zushi,” Moriyama writes for Record 36, “I have a house there and usually visit two or three times a year. The more I drive along the coast and through the streets of the town, the more the images of a young Takuma Nakahira flash through my mind. It’s natural considering that fifty years ago we were close friends eagerly discussing photographic dreams while we walked together through the summer mornings, noon and evenings.”

It is too bad that there is the long gap between 1974 and 2006. To imagine the kinds of issues Moriyama might have produced, chronicling his life and events around him… While especially the years around Camp deserve to be unearthed, an endeavour made difficult by the photographer’s personal problems at the time, the issues of Record we have available cover his earliest, artistically most fruitful time period and the time today, with his name forever etched into the pantheon of contemporary photography.

To approach Moriyama’s Records with the idea of looking for great pictures would miss their point. Even as there is something to be said for careful editing of one’s work, not doing that at all has its advantages as well. If one decides to live one’s life with and in photography, one might as well delineate both — the life and the photographs — with a steady stream of publications that give witness to it all.

After all, the chase for the good pictures that can survive a ruthless edit can be crippling — I’ve encountered as much in students when teaching. What if the idea of the photograph as that precious gem can simply be discarded?

In retrospect, in a world where so many people now do what Daidō Moriyama has been doing for decades, namely relentlessly photographing and sharing their daily lives (much to the chagrin of curators and photography critics wedded to outdated, lazy thinking around photography), this Japanese photographer could be seen as being the true avant-garde yet again, first as a member of a new generation of photographers challenging their elders, and then as the prototype photographer for all those who now make good daily use of the cameras in their smartphones.

Even as it seems clear from Record 2 that the sun is slowly setting over a life in photography, Moriyama’s true legacy is going to remain with us for many years to come. But you will have to look past the harsh contrast of the black and white in the photographs to discover the multi-faceted human being behind them.

Record; photographs by Daidō Moriyama; edited from Records 1 through 30 by Mark Holborn; 424 pages; Thames & Hudson; 2017

Record 2; photographs by Daidō Moriyama; edited from Records 31 through 50 by Mark Holborn; 352 pages; Thames & Hudson; 2024

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I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears

2024-11-11T13:36:44Z

If a rock falls from the sky that must mean something. Because if it didn’t why would it happen? At last that’s we humans approach it. There is something magical about a falling star, even if it isn’t a real star and even if it’s not as rare an event as one might imagine. After all, that rock appears to be coming from another world, a world beyond ours, a world we have no access to other than with our own eyes.

I remember seeing a piece of rock astronauts had brought back from the moon. In the museum setting, the rock had been encased in plexiglass, but there had been a small opening left. If you wanted to you were able to touch the rock with a finger or two. I remember that people must have done exactly that, because the rock looked noticeably different where it had been touched. Thousands and thousands of finger tips had rubbed off part of its surface.

Truth be told, a rock falling from the sky isn’t any more magical than the much larger one we live on. Or rather, a rock falling from the sky is just as magical as the one we live on. But what’s easily available does not come with magic (unless one has managed to keep one’s former childhood sense of wonder and curiosity alive).

For as long as human beings have lived on this planet, they have looked at the sky in wonder, and it’s not hard to understand why. What at first looks like the spherical dome sitting on top of our visible world — much like in medieval illustrations — reveals itself to be a space that has depth once you move away from light pollution. The spherical dome is in fact not a dome: it’s a vast space whose end is not in sight (and which in fact might not have one).

This space reveals itself with time, as you allow your eyes to become sensitive to light that initially you simply would not be able to see. In other words, you see something that you were not able to see before (or you thought that you were unable to do so), and it’s a world that is not merely black and white. Every little sparkle in the sky has its own colour. Some of the sparkles are indeed white, but many are yellow or red or blue.

And out of that vast space — it is vast once you see it the way people saw it before our own lights made it almost disappear — come little rocks our way, crossing the sky in fiery paths, and then crashing into the ground. Again: how is this not magical?

All of this is the premise of Emilia Martin‘s I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears. Using the by now familiar contemporary recipe of assembling the artist’s own photographs (some post-processed) and archival ones and including a similar mix of texts, the book dives into our fascination with meteorites.

For someone with a background in astrophysics these kinds of books have a harder job than others. After all, I am very familiar with the science, and I know some of the history as well. Thankfully, the artist did not attempt to play a scientist (in my book one of the gravest mistake an artist can do). Instead, the book mostly centers on the magic of the experience and on the many ways human beings have tried to make sense of these rocks.

As can be expected, the text and images work in different ways. In effect, they complement each other to build up the overall story (“story” is not necessarily the best word to describe it, but for the sake of simplicity I will stick with it). The book itself contributes through its smart and elegant production choices (may I add that at 32 Euros, it will not break the bank — a most welcome price point in a world where now $75 or $85 books have become the norm).

There is, of course, Regine Petersen‘s Find a Fallen Star, a three-volume book that also covers meteorites. Contrary to what many teachers and art critics want us to believe, there is much to be said for the same idea or topic being covered by more than one artist. After all, art is no competition — even if it’s often treated as such.

If I had to pick one book… Which I don’t, because as I said, art is no competition… But still, if I had to pick one it would be Martin’s book, mostly because it is more magical. The older I get, the more magic I want. Plus, magic allows for uncertainty, and uncertainty allows for the space that art, and only art, can fill.

That said, at times even I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears is a little bit too cerebral. It would seem that contemporary photographers and their book makers just can’t help themselves. Do I really need to see a grid of similar looking photographs on a spread, supplanting actual magic with whatever this photography game is supposed to be? I think not. I probably also didn’t need any of the explanatory texts.

Maybe there should have been even more magic, even more playing around with possibilities and uncertainty — but then it might just be a different book, and what point is there is discussing an imaginary book over the one at hand?

My minor misgivings aside, I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears demonstrates the strength of contemporary photobook making and storytelling. It’s a charming and engaging book that invites the viewer to come back simply by offering surprise revelations here and there. If you miss something the first time around, there always is that second time.

But the book also is a reminder of the simple fact that magic can be had in the simplest of ways: by looking at the stars. Maybe one of them will even fall in front of your feet. You never know.

I saw a tree bearing stones in the place of apples and pears; photographs and texts by Emilia Martin and various authors; unpaginated; Yogurt Editions; 2024

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Gate Hack Eden

2024-10-28T12:46:24Z

It is rare to encounter a photobook that is able to open up radically new ways of thinking around how the printed picture can operate. There is only so much you can do with the general form. You will have to arrange the pages in some fashion, and you will have to assemble everything in such a way that it fulfills the basic functions of a book.

A gifted artist, however, might decide to leave some conventions by the wayside for the sake of his own work. With Osamu Kanemura‘s Gate Hack Eden, a truly groundbreaking publication has been published that pushes the boundaries of the photobook in any number of ways, all of them good.

The book was published by ori.studio, which sells the book through their online store. I bought it through ShaShaSha (link here), mostly because adding in more books (by different Japanese artists) made shipping costs more palatable. The book is not particularly large, but it requires careful handling and shipping. If you live outside of Japan, you will have to pay for that.

The Japanese Yen is rather weak at the time of this writing, meaning that the book itself costs about $80. That is a lot of money for a book; and yet I need to point out that a lot of recent photobook releases by Western publishers have now reached price points of $75 or $85. From what I can tell, general costs in the world of the photobook (paper, printing, etc.) have gone up quite a bit recently.

If this is of any help, when you buy a copy of Gate Hack Eden, you’re not buying a book. You’re buying a piece of art. In a general fashion, all photobooks are art. But I’m not talking about that low bar. This particular publication is a piece of art in ways that most other books simply are not.

To begin with, it looks and feels like a piece of art. The closest object I can think of that has some similarities to what the object looks like is an external hard drive. The book presents itself as a black block that sits on top of a smaller white block.

If you put it in front of you on a table — to look at the book, you will absolutely need a table — Gate Hack Eden commands its presence. That presence is a lot larger than the size (163 × 117 × 81 mm) would have you imagine.

How do you look at it? In a very basic sense, the object operates just like any other book, or rather it has the same elements as most other books. The black exterior operates like a slipcase. You can slide it off by pulling it upwards. Once that has been achieved, the cover will open: two cardboard pages that fall away from the interior of the book. Now, you can see the individual pages.

You will also see that the book has five sections, each of them sandwiched by two thin, transparent plexiglass sheets (the one at the top is visible before you open the book). To make the book, its makers had to use some material to give everything just enough stability for it not to fall apart.

Four of the sections contain images, the fifth contains essays (in Japanese and English). When assembled, the former are hidden underneath the black slip case, while the latter is visible at the base of the book. One of the plexiglass sheets juts out a little and creates the base for the slipcase to rest on.

Fully assembled, Gate Hack Eden is very stable. Once the slipcase has been pulled off, the objects becomes a lot more fragile.

Again, how do you look at this? In a nutshell, the five sections are stacked on top of each other. The pages are bound using a single screw post, meaning that in order to look at the images you need to swivel them open. If you want to imagine that you’re playing a game of cards, the pages very much behave like playing cards you’re holding in your hands.

The description of the book states that it has 1648 pages. Initially, I found that hard to believe. I don’t know whether it’s true (I’m not going to count the pages). But given how thin the pages are, I have no doubt that it’s true (the essays are printed on thicker paper). The essay section has 48 pages, which gives you four sections with 400 pages each.

What are all of these images? Apparently, each book was assembled from the same set of pages (or rather subsections of pages), albeit in its own order, creating a sense of randomness for each viewer.

In one section, a large number of black and white photographs unfolds. The paper is so thin that one doesn’t really know whether one possibly missed a page. Two pages might have stuck together. But that wouldn’t matter.

The photographs aren’t photographs, they’re fragments of a larger photograph, and that larger photograph appears to show some greenery in front of one of the many soulless buildings that clutter the Tokyo cityscape. It might be a train station or maybe a parking garage or maybe an indoor mall. It doesn’t matter (the complete disregard for the larger cityscape with which Japanese real-estate developers approach erecting buildings is truly astonishing).

There is picture after picture of the same thing, presented as tiny shards of a larger whole. It is these shards that are more interesting than the larger whole, even if that larger whole never becomes visible. Or maybe it does, elsewhere.

When the next shard finally changes to something noticeably different, there is a brief sense of relief for the viewer. But the next subsection turns out to be just as visually jarring as the one before it. It’s Tokyo, after all, the amazing city that manages to hide its beautiful soul behind mind-numbingly boring facades — and consumption, endless consumption. “I don’t like Tokyo,” Kanemura noted in the first interview included in Beta Exercise.

(Between Spider’s Strategy, Gate Hack Eden, or Beta Exercise, you probably noticed some idiosyncratic word choices; compare: “Mass of the Fermenting Dregs […] The distinctive name […] is simply a collection of words that the original members of the line-up liked.”)

“I started taking pictures of developments promoted by big capital,” the artist said in the same interview, “whose values neglect whether or not they are actually liveable for humans, although I felt uncomfortable about it.” And: “Living under the urban capitalist system strips subjectivity from human beings, transforming them into a mere part of its system.”

It’s not all black and white photographs. There also are shards taken from any number of printed materials, from what look like video stills (Kanemura has a background in video and is using that medium as well), and from drawings, busy doodles that channel the photographs’ nervous energy. In between, there also are larger scenes (that possibly appear broken up elsewhere), the types of photographs the artist is known for in the West (think Spider’s Strategy).

All of this combines into an incredibly immersive experience for a viewer. The little black tower disintegrates before her or his eyes (by their own choice), to reveal a visual chaos that means everything and nothing. You will have to shed your expectations of “narrative” or “sequence” when you approach this book, much like you will have to ignore what it means to edit photographs.

Gate Hack Eden exists outside of the widely accepted narrow ideas of how photographs ought to be treated and used. The book uniquely focuses on Tokyo in a way impossible for, say, New York City, Berlin, London, or Warsaw. Whatever you might be able to say about those Western cities, none of them has the nervous energy Tokyo has, and none of them comes even close in terms of creating its own specific world.

“I have no interest in photos that imply something,” Kanemura said in the same interview I quoted from above, “I’m interested in the possibility of the photograph that doesn’t imply anything, cut off from any implication or meaning.” I might as well note that even if that interest is absent, I don’t think it’s possible to escape the clutches of implication quite that easily.

I think it is only through the form of this book — as opposed to Spider’s Strategy — that the artist achieves that goal. The conventional form of the well-known book only brings back too many implications. Here, though, through the inclusion of all of these other materials and through the cutting up of photographs into smaller parts, the aspect of photography as this thing being done with these specific cameras falls away.

Here, photography finally is a form of art that transcends what the vast majority of photographers have been trying to do before. Here, photography becomes art because it acts like it — and not because it follows artificial conventions.

Thus, Gate Hack Eden is a absolutely essential masterpiece, a publication that explodes the boundaries of the photobook. Unlike artists such as Paul Graham, who have remained stuck in making work that ultimately only attempts to showcase the cerebral approach with which it was made, Osamu Kanemura has figured out how to re-define photography.

I’m in awe.

Gate Hack Eden; photographs and images by Osamu Kanemura; essays by Osamu Kanemura and Pauline Vermare; 1648 pages; ori.studio; 2024

You Can Fix a House With Enough Duct Tape

2024-10-21T12:41:24Z

“The foreign obsession with Japan’s material culture began soon after the opening of the nation’s ports in 1853,” Matt Alt writes, detailing how the West fell in love with what became known as Japonisme in French. “Often overlooked, however,” he continues, “is the fact that, at the same time, the western world possessed an equal or even greater fascination with the absence of Japanese stuff.”

In fact, there is a straight line from an observation by the UK’s first ambassador to Japan (quoted by Alt: “There is something to admire in this Spartan simplicity of habits, which seems to extend through all their life, and they pride themselves upon it.”) to contemporary self-help gurus such as Marie Kondo and her Netflix show.

As Alt outlines, none of this actually makes sense: “If Japan truly were a minimalist paradise, why would it need Kondos and Sasakis in the first place?” (Fumio Sasaki is another self-help guru.)

But labels stick not because they’re truthful but because they’re underpinned by ideology. That a lack of material possessions in early modern Japanese history might simply have reflected the general poverty of larger segments of the population escaped most outside observers.

You only have to go to Japan today and look around to find a country that is considerably more complex than the serene paradise of Zen temples and Muji stores inhabited by people who prefer to live with less.

In fact, that idea is belied by some of the most well known attractions of the country, such as the famous Shibuya crossing. How is that zen? Or step into any of the hyper commercialized public spaces to encounter New York’s Times Square on steroids. Again, there’s absolutely nothing zen about those spaces, with their onslaught of audiovisual cues.

Artists such as, for example, Osamu Kanemura have long focused on the visual clutter (let’s stick with Alt’s word choice). In the West, Kanemura is mostly known through his Spider’s Strategy, a depiction of the clutter of electricity and utility wires in Tokyo’s built environment.

Apart from being a writer, this artist has long moved into making videos and ambitious installations of his work, and Spider’s Strategy does not even remotely capture the breadth of Kanemura’s output around his main theme of work.

Interestingly, it was through Kanemura’s Instagram feed that I came across Kohei Maekawa‘s You Can Fix a House With Enough Duct Tape.

Much like eBay, Instagram has lost almost all of its utility as a site where photography can be discovered. But you can win the lottery, and there are those rare moments when you can find genuinely interesting work you haven’t seen before or snatch up something great on eBay. Having just managed to do both, I’m thinking that there’s a long dry spell ahead of me.

Regardless, Maekawa’s book is self-published, and I bought it directly from the artist who very kindly shipped the book before I had even had had a chance to pay for it (if he has his own website, I have not been able to locate it; I messaged him through his Instagram account).

The book comes in the form of a folded piece of cardboard with a photograph attached to the front and the title and artist’s name on the back (in Japanese and English). Inside, there’s a statement about the work (the English version was produced using a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT), a small (inkjet) print, and a set of unbound sheets of prints. Everything is held together with a single binding clip, the type that you might use in an office setting.

Whether or not this is a book or a portfolio of prints is too boring a conversation for me to engage in (the accountants of the photo world can argue about this). Conceptually, though, the rickety construction of this publication is in full service of what the photographs show. Having worked as a delivery driver in suburban Tokyo for years, Maekawa photographed the kind of folk art that he encountered while doing his job: involuntary sculptures if you will or maybe bricolage.

Maekawa mostly photographed at night with a flash, which serves to enhance the sculptural properties of the various objects he came across, a dazzling array of useless beauty. Maybe it is because my late father-in-law had produced similar objects in his workshop and backyard that I am particularly interested in the work. You might be able to find these kinds of art works that nobody would consider as such in many other places of the world.

Whatever it might be, I’m finding myself deeply fascinated by Maekawa’s photographs, especially given that the visual delight they offer does not appear to fade away. And much like the photographer, I can’t help but wonder about the people who are responsible for this kind of visual culture. “The open-ended egos and ideas embedded in their creations are uncharted territory,” he writes, “and to me, at least, remain beyond reach.”

And therein lies the beauty of it all: doesn’t art often start exactly where understanding ceases?

The artistic geniuses behind the various installations encountered by Kohei Maekawa while delivering pizza are likely to remain anonymous. They do not have a place within the grim sphere known as the art world. But their ambitions and ideas nevertheless have resulted in the creation of often surprisingly complex pieces of art.

Neoliberal thinking has brought us the idea of art for everybody (meaning: everybody can consume art by placing some money on the table). You Can Fix a House With Enough Duct Tape, with its Arte Povera elements, shows us the counter model: art can be made by everybody. And it can be enjoyed if you keep an eye out for it.

Recommended.

You Can Fix a House With Enough Duct Tape, photographs and text by Kohei Maekawa; unbound set of prints; self-published; 2024

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Portraits in Life and Death

2024-10-14T12:26:00Z

There a numerous reasons why Peter Hujar is not as widely known as anyone who is familiar with his work would assume. Such familiarity has so far been difficult to obtain. Hujar published one book during his life time, the 1976 Portraits in Life and Death. The book had been out of print until this month. Now, there is a much overdue reissue.

Hujar has so far been shoehorned into being a very specific photographer: a photographer not just of any time and place, but one who lived in New York City before and during the AIDS crisis. His own untimely death at age 53 would include him in the countless victims of that disease — at the time, they were stigmatized in the most revolting fashion.

Of course, Peter Hujar was very much a member of New York’s artistic community, and the death toll created by AIDS is very much real. When I wrote that he was being shoehorned, I do not intend to take anything away — on the contrary. What I mean to argue instead is that beyond that specificity in time and place, there is a universality in his work that deserves to be seen more widely.

It’s a trite statement to say that portrait photography uniquely centers on the human condition. The moment you place yourself with a camera in front of someone who has agreed to be photographed, the resulting picture (or pictures) will say something about the human condition.

What makes photographic portraiture so interesting is that if you take a picture of someone famous, most people will obtain a picture of someone famous. In his very good pictures, though, Hujar was able to create photographs of human beings, people as brilliant and flawed and vulnerable and lonely as he was, and the fact that they were famous plays no role in any of that. You can see people with an inner life, possibly a very rich one.

Being able to take these kinds of photographs is a gift that even someone like Hujar was not able to conjure at will. In Peter Hujar’s Day, a conversation with Linda Rosenkrantz about a single day in the artist’s life, Hujar somewhat casually re-narrates how on 18 December 1974, he set out to photograph Allan Ginsberg as a commission piece for the New York Times.

Long story short, he treks over to what at the time was one of the seediest areas in Manhattan, 10th Street between Avenues C and D. “The neighborhood intimidates me,” he tells Rosenkrantz, “it’s frightening, so run down and dreary. I don’t have any real fear but it’s very uncomfortable to go down there.” Thinking that Hujar somehow is much more connected to the Times than he was, Ginsberg at first acts like a real jerk, only to warm up a little later (in the way that an incredibly chilly morning might do in mid-winter).

The photography session unfolds as a real disaster. Ginsberg breaks out into chanting at various times (“He sat down in the lotus position, looking very Buddha, right in the doorway, and started to chant. And I really thought well, I can’t interrupt God.” — Hujar), but there are pictures for the photographer. And he knows that these pictures are of the first kind I mentioned above: they’re of someone famous. But they’re not more than that.

After all, even for someone as gifted as Peter Hujar, there is only so much that can be done when the stars do not align in the right fashion as someone’s portrait is being taken. You can see one of the Ginsberg photographs here.

What it is (or rather was) that enabled Hujar to align the stars in just the right fashion I don’t know. Of course, there are all the statements made about Hujar by those who knew him (many of them found themselves in front of his camera; many of them the kinds of irritating motormouths New York tends to produce in such abundance).

Susan Sontag, a close friend, wrote the introduction to Portraits in Life and Death, which is included in the reissue. The portrait of her by can be found in the book. I suppose it’s maybe the one photograph by this artist that is more widely known. Alas, it’s also just a picture of someone famous. It’s very good. But it doesn’t go where many of Hujar’s real treasures went.

I’m thinking that Peter Hujar knew of the power a camera can have because he placed himself in front of his own many times. There are two such picture in the book. The first shows him mid leap in his own apartment, giving a military style salute to the camera. This is brilliant. It’s not necessarily a masterpiece photograph; but I don’t think I can imagine another photographer, living or dead, who would pull this off (other than, maybe, Nadar whose photographic materials were way too slow to allow him to do this).

The second photograph can also be found on the cover of Peter Hujar’s Day. It shows Hujar lying in bed. His arms are raised above his head and rest on the pillow. The photographer has turned his head just enough for him to be facing the camera.

I have no way of knowing whether this photograph was made on the same day that he took my favourite photograph of his (which, alas, is not included in the book). In that photograph, Hujar, fully nude, is slouched on a chair. To say that there is a quiet desperation on view would be to take words to describe a situation that exists outside of language itself. The photograph is entitled Seated Self-Portrait Depressed, 1980.

It’s one thing to expose others to the camera’s cruel gaze. It’s quite another to be as relentless in exposing yourself to it as Peter Hujar did. He knew what it meant to suffer. So he knew what he was asking of others when they presented themselves to his camera. That, and only that, is what it takes to be a really great photographer.

When you look at Portraits in Life and Death, you want to ignore everything you know about those portrayed (there’s an index in the back). Instead, try to see the human beings that Peter Hujar saw.

Highly recommended.

Portraits in Life and Death; photographs by Peter Hujar; essays by Susan Sontag and Benjamin Moser; 100 pages; Liveright; 2024

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Costa Bravo Holiday Paradise

2024-10-07T12:51:16Z

We don’t really know much about Tomas, other than what we can infer from the photographs and words he left behind. Oh, and there are the snippets of memories by his grandson Terje (Terje Abusdal, the photographer), who was too young to ask more questions around the time Tomas took his pictures.

Tomas moved in with Terje’s family after his wife had died. He was already in his seventies. Even as his upcoming exploits — in the form of travels — would hint at a man aware of a newly found freedom, it would appear that he also was fundamentally lazy. Without a wife serving him life might have been too difficult, too tedious certainly.

There’s a short story in Costa Bravo Holiday Paradise about how Tomas, the widower, went to see his childhood sweetheart who had remained unmarried. Alas, he was told that now it would be too late to get married.

Which is interesting, because on the one hand, there is the possibility of romantic love and the reality of life near its end. On the other hand, the childhood sweetheart might not have needed a possibly rather helpless and lazy old man to take care of, given she had avoided just that all her life.

We will never know. We can only imagine.

By the way, if you spotted a typo in the title: congratulations! It’s Tomas’, and Terje carried it forward. So please don’t email Terje or me. We know.

But it’s a very interesting typo, isn’t it? Having taken up traveling late in life, Tomas went to a number of places to enjoy the good life. This included the Costa Brava. I’m imagining that he maybe misread the name of the locale as a confirmation that finally!, he had taken up living the good life. Bravo! (Again, we will never know.)

The good life thus consisted of traveling and seeing places and people. People inevitably included women, and as far as one can tell the seeing remained that, seeing. “There are many out of focus pictures of younger women,” Terje writes, “and over seventy self-portraits. He gave the camera to strangers and posed.”

For many of his photographs, Tomas wrote short captions. The photographs are interesting because they’re so utilitarian and artless, and the same is true for the captions. A somewhat blurry photograph of some red and white flowering bushes, possibly located in the setting of a shopping mall, comes with the caption “Many flowers” (the captions were all written in Norwegian, there are English translations underneath).

It’s hard to tell whether there was any depth to Tomas’ life. There might not have been. Depth does not necessarily make for an interesting or good life. (The lack thereof doesn’t either, though.)

At some stage, Tomas was so old that he was unable to travel on his own any longer. Given the above, you can probably guess what happened. Yes, that’s right, family members had to travel along to make sure that Tomas was not missing out.

And who can blame him? From what Terje infers, Tomas had never liked the work he had had to do his whole life. And he might not have liked his deceased wife, either: “There are no pictures of his wife in the albums. There is only an image of the headstone on her grave.”

Ultimately, though, all we can do as viewers is to infer what we might be able to come up with, given the photographs and the few details that Terje is able to remember or was told earlier.

The more often I look at the book, the bleaker it gets. Obviously, that’s me seeing Tomas, and it’s me seeing the world. Your own impressions might be very different.

There have been many books made with photographs left behind by often nameless strangers. Working with such imagery has spawned its own industry, with some artists doing only that. The problem with those books for me usually is that the material is enticing or maybe even really interesting. But once the novelty has worn off, you’re left with… Well, not much.

In the case of Costa Bravo Holiday Paradise it’s the other way around. The photographs aren’t particularly spectacular. But there is enough in them that forms an image of the person who took them (or had others take them for — and of — him). There are, in other words, many small hooks that attach to a viewer’s own flesh, making her or him think about life choices and about what it means to be a person in this world.

Whether or not the life choices one infers for Tomas have anything to do with reality is completely besides the point. The man has been dead for a long time, so there is no way of finding out. It seems clear, though, that he managed to set up a relatively happy ending for an otherwise unhappy or maybe discontented life.

And that’s what we all have to do with our own lives: deal with their realities and see what we can make out of them. Ideally, we’ll be starting to think about this a lot earlier than Tomas might have done.

Costa Bravo Holiday Paradise; photographs by Tomas Mølland, edited by Terje Abusdal; 144 pages; journal; 2024

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Iuzza

2024-09-30T12:38:29Z

How do you re-narrate the totality of someone’s life, whether your own or someone else’s? It would seem that providing as much detail as possible will help an audience understand the person in question. But as Édouard Levé demonstrated in his book Autoportrait, the accumulation of the most precise and minute statements only produces an incredibly compelling and magical piece of art, without bringing a reader any closer to the lived reality of the author’s life.

Photographs add a complication to the already fraught task of narration, given how mute they are. It’s not the trite fact that they only show surfaces; instead, it’s their completely fragmented nature that makes them such cumbersome entities to work with when biography is the intended end result.

Photographs are puzzle pieces that typically do not connect with each other. The best you can hope for when working with them is the creation of a mosaic.

There is much to be said for such mosaics, though, especially in light of the ultimate futility of attempting to re-narrate someone’s life: if, as is obvious, a life cannot be re-narrated truthfully, whether on an atomic Levé level or a much larger one, the deliberate exclusion of a life’s aspects (“facts”) can serve to create the larger whole. And words — written text — can fill the role that plaster plays in a physical mosaic.

Francesca Todde‘s Iuzza relies on photographs and text to re-narrate aspects of the Italian actress and writer Goliarda Sapienza‘s life. There are seven chapters, each with its own particular focus. The bulk of the text comes at the end of the book, even as it refers to some of the visual elements presented earlier.

A disclaimer: I was not familiar with Sapienza. While I know a few things about Italy, I ended up feeling that I probably do not know enough about either the actress/writer or the country to be able to fully understand the book. I do think that the book probably relies on an audience that has more knowledge about its topic than I am able to bring to the table. You will want to keep in mind.

This is not to say that I did not enjoy spending time with the book. I did. As is the case for all of the books made by Départ Pour l’Image, a relatively new publisher based in Italy, the book has been produced with a lot of attention to detail, and it features wonderful photography.

Given my relative ignorance of the main topic, I probably picked up a few notes more than others. In particular, there is a pervasive feeling of sadness throughout the book, a feeling of melancholia. At any given moment, I thought, it could tip into something much more severe.

I have been to Italy numerous times. As much as I enjoy the country — how could one not when surrounded by so much culture and a real appreciation for good food and drink? — the inevitable presence of the country’s past always had me on edge. You might imagine the country being a gigantic theme park, and there certainly are areas that feel like that. But historical sites and buildings are so common that outside of the very touristy areas, they still cast their shadows.

Maybe there is something to be said for the stereotype that if you are born in Germany, some of the ideas of Romanticism will inevitably become ingrained in your psyche: the idea that decay and beauty combine in a fashion that might reveal a dark side any time soon. Maybe that is what I connected with on my trips to Italy and when looking at this book.

Some of the text in the back of the book informs me that Sapienza did indeed have periods where her mental health deteriorated, with severe depression playing a role. This is not sadness, and it is not melancholia. It’s something else entirely.

Thus with this book, I am bringing certain aspects to the table — a history of depression and that German Romanticism I mentioned above. What I’m connecting with is something that the work attempts to communicate. I can see it in the pictures, and the words are clear as well.

I suppose all of the above also must acknowledge the crucial fact that the final part of a biography — anyone’s, whether Levé’s or Sapienza’s — is always formed in a reader’s/viewer’s head: you respond to what you can and want to respond to. That’s the beauty of it all.

As I said, only a person who is more immersed in the world presented in the book can probably more fully appreciate and enjoy it. But that’s OK. In the end, with all pieces of art we’re limited in what we have available when facing them. The purpose of art cannot be to serve those fully in the know. Instead, art needs to reach out to those who are not.

That is what Iuzza does.

IUZZA. Goliarda Sapienza; photographs by Francesca Todde; texts by Luca Reffo; 280 pages; Départ Pour l’Image; 2024

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History of Poland Vol. 2

2024-09-23T12:31:37Z

Sandwiched between two perpetually murderous nations (Germany and russia), Poland has had its fair share of tragedy over the course of its history. It is situated at the western edge of the region termed Bloodlands by historian Timothy Snyder who described the reign of destruction inflicted by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. At various points in time, Poland ceased to exist as a state, having been parceled up and incorporated into neighboring empires. No surprise then that national identity and history — mind you, the writing of it — play an enormous role in Poland.

This became especially clear during the recent reign of the neofascist PiS party that sought to re-define history (as all neofascist parties do) to further the country’s glory, elevating any number of odious characters (ditto) and demonizing its neighbours, which, granted, had brought much destruction to Polish lands. Of course, given how bad it had been that destruction did not need any PiS efforts to talk it up. And PiS’ embrace of some of the more odious aspects of Polish history also did not reflect well on the country.

But neofascism isn’t interested in historical facts or truth: it’s interested in a glorified past that aligns with its ideology, and it’s interested in constantly whipping up voters’ resentment. Resentment drives the neofascist project, in particular the ideas that a) people voting for neofascist parties somehow are overlooked, ignored, and/or forgotten while others reap the benefits (cue the inevitable racism and antisemitism) and b) the country needs to go back to a glorious past that has been betrayed by “elites” in power.

Even without the neofascist project history is constantly being re-written and adjusted. This is not just because there might be the occasional new discovery, whether archeological or otherwise. But people’s thinking also evolves. A few hours ago, I visited a village just to the north of where I am writing these words. In one of the historical houses, one of the volunteers bombarded me with details about the various rooms none of which I retained, simply because I was so struck by her use of “we” and “the English” — as if somehow this was still the 18th Century.

In a different building, a museum, you could easily discover updates to the various displays. A number of stone plaques, created to memorialize people (colonial settlers) who had lived there, had been covered up with cloth ones: the language had been changed in order to reflect today’s sensibilities. A corner now contained word of the role of slavery in the village, and various items had been removed from vitrines and replaced with signs that they were now being looked at to determine whether it was culturally sensitive to still display them.

History, in effect, does not exist. History is always an exercise in ideology, however benign one might imagine that ideology might be. It is the telling of history that reflects what a country believes about itself, and for me, that is one of the most interesting aspects of history (because, let’s face it, the re-telling of most historical facts — usually endless names of rulers — is mostly very tedious).

By construction, there is a certain cartoonishness to historical reenactments. Everybody knows that it’s costumes, and everybody knows that those wearing them typically live much more comfortable lives than the ones they pretend to exhibit during the shows. Furthermore, the selectiveness of their historical narration is amplified through the spectacle itself, which, of course, has to be entertaining for spectators.

With all of the above in mind, historical reenactments really are not about the past. They’re about the present: they reflect what people want to believe in. And that’s why they can be so interesting. Over the years, I have seen a number of photography projects about such reenactments. The problem with such projects is that it’s so easy to get the pictures, but it’s so hard to make them about more than the costumes. It’s the costumes, after all, and possibly the fake blood that will get all of the attention.

Michał Sita‘s History of Poland Vol. 2 differs from such project for two reasons: first, there is added text, words spoken by some of the reenactors. Second, and crucially, Sita himself was one of them, wearing a camera around his neck during the proceedings (the camera took a photograph every second, and while it was not visible for spectators, the other reenactors were aware of it). There also are a few other photographs that look as if they were taken with a different camera.

The show in question is called The Eagle and the Cross, and it’s happening in Murowana Goślina, a small town in western Poland, just north of Poznań (which, if you don’t know, sits about in the middle between Berlin and Warsaw). The show feature six separate chapters, starting somewhere in the Middle Ages and ending with a Nazi soldier sending prisoners to Auschwitz (the book explains some of the events and characters).

I was particularly struck by one of the text sections in which a volunteer actor imagined how one of the thousands of Polish officers murdered by Soviet soldiers in Katyn might have faced his death. It is clear that the actor does not have the unnamed officer in mind. There might not have been a specific officer anyway, a person with a family. No, it’s an unknown officer, one whose death will later play a role when both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union will accuse each other of the massacre.

And of course, the death also plays a role in the play: yet another, very different role. “Pride,” the actor imagines, “is not a smile, but rather a grimace showing that he is no longer afraid and is ready for what is about to happen.” “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” the Roman poet Horace had already written two millennia earlier: “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.” But it’s not just sweet and proper, you also have to go about it with pride so that your death might serve those who survive or live later.

There is something unsettling about a book that lays out so clearly how the past is made to serve contemporary purposes. But it’s an important book, especially given the fact how the past has become weaponized by the neofascists — in Poland as much as in the US, Germany, Hungary, Italy, russia (the movement’s center), and elsewhere. Even as it’s important for us to understand the past, it’s equally or possibly even more important for us to understand to what end we want to understand it.

History of Poland Vol. 2; photographs and text by Michał Sita; 96 pages; Sun Archive Books; 2024

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The African Gaze

2024-09-16T12:53:12Z

It’s probably fair to say that the one place that has most severely been photographically misrepresented is the continent of Africa. There are many contributing factors, most notably, of course, colonialism. The European colonial project relied on the camera for its purposes, defining to a large extent how Africa was to be seen. But it doesn’t stop there.

Western photojournalism played and still plays a major role in the continued misrepresentation of Africa. It doesn’t matter at all whether photojournalists went or go to Africa with the best of intentions (as they typically do); what matters is that many of them appear to be oblivious of the issue at hand.

One of the key approaches to rectifying the situation entails looking at the work of local photographers. How have photographers born and working in Africa portrayed the people in the various countries they were and/or are living in?

In photoland, this approach is typically broadly described as centering on a person’s gaze. It’s likely that you will be familiar with the term “the male gaze”. But you need to be careful with that term, because the male gaze is not identical with a man being the photographer. What it means instead is that the world is portrayed in such a fashion that the visual representation conforms to how an assertive heterosexual man views it. As is very obvious from the world of fashion photography, women photographers can easily re-produce the male gaze.

In much the same fashion, to discover the African gaze you need to go deeper as well. Photographers from Africa can easily produce what you might want to think of as a neocolonial view of Africa (the most obvious example is provided by some of Pieter Hugo’s work).

The following might be tad naive, but it still might serve as a good initial approach to how to distinguish the neocolonial view from a real African gaze. The former is produced for outsiders (in Hugo’s case, a Western art market interested in pictures that look good over wealthy collectors’ couches). The latter is produced for a local audience (even if it could eventually reach an audience outside of Africa).

Amy Sall‘s new book The African Gaze provides a most welcome overview of some of the richness produced by photographers and filmmakers from Africa.

I should note that in the following, I will focus on the first half of the book, photography. This is because I know next to nothing about film making in general. I don’t mean to imply that film making is not interesting. It might well be. I simply don’t watch many movies. As a consequence, there’s nothing of any value that I could say about them. I am in no position to assess the second half of the book in any kind of critical capacity.

In a nutshell, The African Gaze contains introductions to 25 photographers and 25 filmmakers. In the photography case, the artists hail from Algeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Niger, Senegal, South Africa, Sudan, and Uganda (several countries are represented by more than one photographer).

Individual biographies might be more complex. For example, Augustt Azaglo Cornélius Yawo was born in Togo. He spent his childhood and formative years there and in Ghana. He then became a prominent photographer in Côte d’Ivoire after he settled in that country at age 31.

For sure, some of the names will be more familiar to a Western audience than others. Malick Sidibé’s work is relatively well known in the West (not necessarily compared with Western artists but certainly when compared with photographers from Africa), as is Ernest Cole’s, Samuel Fosso’s, or James Barnor’s.

One of the most interesting aspects of looking through the book — besides the discover of any number of incredible artists — is understanding the many shared sensibilities between the photographers, since it connects the known names with the lesser known ones and their background.

The business of the photography studio provides the most prominent backdrop of vast parts of the work showcased in The African Gaze. The photographs in question were commissioned by people coming to the studios who wanted to have a visual keepsake — much like how in other parts of the world photo studios played the same role.

The role of photography studios is possibly underappreciated in photoland for any number of reasons. Where photo studio artists have become known, it’s mostly because of the perceived exoticism of their work — and this is not necessarily only the West looking at the rest of the world. Reading about the work of, for example, Mike Disfarmer, I usually can’t help but think that it’s the perceived exoticism of those in the photographs that provides most of its appeal.

Of course, there also is the fact that given its very traditional and conservative leanings, photoland demands that photographers be artists, and an artist is supposed to be independent of the whims of the people paying for their work (however laughable an idea this is once you look at how the art market works). A true photolandian portraitist must insist on their own artistic genius over what their sitters want. Throw in some classism, and thus the whole rich genre of the photo studio is mostly relegated to the dustbin.

If as a viewer, you’re able to free yourself from how photoland views photography studio work, The African Gaze has much to offer. Time and again, the photographers were able to produce the most amazing work, even as they often eschewed what elsewhere were considered photo-studio conventions.

In maybe the most exciting such example, Oumar Ly’s assistant spread his arms while standing behind a young woman holding her young child, creating a backdrop with the fabric of his garment. In Ly’s framing, the assistant’s head and left hand remain visible, as does part of the background. The resulting photograph is a portrait of a woman and her child. But it also is a portrait of a life situation — the complete opposite of the family propaganda that was so commonly produced in the West.

This is the main point of The African Gaze: how you look at someone (and with what ideas in mind) determines what you will see. A whole continent narrowly defined using racist ideas can only emerge on its own terms if it is allowed to do that, if, in other words, it is encountered on its own terms.

The photographers in the book — in combination with those who commissioned their work — set those terms, terms that not only enrich our understanding of Africa but also challenge some of the ideas we have adopted for the depictions of ourselves.

Recommended.

The African Gaze; images by various artists; essays/texts by Amy Sall, Mamadou Diouf, Yasmina Price, Zoé Samudzi; 288 pages; Thames & Hudson; 2024

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