It’s ironic that the most basic and essential artistic tools we have — our hands — are so difficult to represent in pieces of art. Hands are notoriously difficult to paint. And they’re equally difficult to photograph, given that the moment you point your camera at a hand, the outcome is likely to come across as too staged, too heavy-handed (please excuse the inadvertent pun). Even Silicon Valley’s image-thievery-and-regurgitation (“AI”) tools struggle with hands, giving them too many fingers or morphing them into unsightly blobs.

There is something intriguing about the fact that as essential as they are in our daily lives, for works of art hands do not play as huge a role as one might imagine. Greek or Roman statues, for example, which might have been preserved without their extremities still powerfully convey what they were meant to.

“Their hands shamelessly reveal their innermost secrets,” the main character in Stefan Zweig’s Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman says of gamblers she is observing in a casino. You can’t photograph secrets, though, and a photograph of a hand mostly remains that, a photograph of a hand. This is mostly because as tools, hands live from their actions, from how they move and what they do. In a photograph (or painting or sculpture), all of that is lost.

In a nutshell, this means that as an artist you have two choices. You can either attempt to render hands as faithfully as possible, which in photography means to capture them in such a fashion that things don’t look staged. As anyone knows who has ever had to pose someone, it’s the hands that result in the biggest difficulties. Alternatively, you can photographs hands not as what they are but what they are used for.

As it turns out, hands are malleable tools that can be used to communicate as well: sign language. Even if you have not learned sign language to communicate words without sound, chances are that your vocabulary of sign language is larger than you might imagine.

Furthermore, your knowledge of sign language is very much localized. Move to a different cultural background, and the same symbols can mean very different things. I found out when I moved to the US from Germany (you might imagine that this hardly was much of a change in cultural background), and a vast part of the symbols I used to form with my hands or the gestures I used them for became meaningless.

Even if people do not understand what you are trying to tell them with your hands, they know that it must mean something. In effect, even when almost no communication is possible, a smile and some hand gestures go a long way. And therein lies some potential for art making.

Ilse Oosterkamp‘s Fingers demonstrates how this can be done. The idea of the book is very, very simple. Each photograph shows a single hand that is contorted in some fashion (against a black background). As a viewer, one quickly realizes that it’s the same hand. That’s because the fingers look the same in all of the photographs, but also because the contortions rely on a form of flexibility most people’s hands simply don’t have.

Each photograph is presented on its own spread (there is an overview of all of them at the end). On the opposite page, there is a block of pastel colour. I have no way of knowing what led to the addition of colour in the book, but it’s a crucial aspect: without the colour, the book would almost inevitably be seen as a typology of hands. Whatever you want to say about typologies, they’re cerebral and mostly devoid of emotion.

Here, the colours add a sense of emotion to the photographs, and it is that sense of emotion that pulls the viewer towards trying to understand those hands and what they might mean to say.

They don’t mean to say anything.

If you read the short text that is included in the inside of the book’s dust jacket in the front, you learn that Melle, the young person whose hand is photographed, has multiple disabilities. “As a result,” Oosterkamp writes, “he can effortlessly create short-lived sculptures with his fingers.”

The knowledge of this information does nothing to lessen the book’s impact.

Regardless of whether you view the hand as forming a sculpture or as communicating in a code you are not familiar with, it’s clear that you’re being brought into a person’s own little world, a world in which these hand gestures frozen in time have their own meaning.

Fingers; photographs by Ilse Oosterkamp; 64 pages; Van Zoetendaal; 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s really depressing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recommended.

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

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In late 1918, the newly created Weimar Republic emerged at a moment in time that would coincide with drastic changes to Germany’s culture as a whole, with a particular focus on its visual culture. Photography had already been invented much earlier (at a time when Germany was still a patchwork of statelets). But it had taken time for what we could now consider its most defining feature to fully emerge: mass reproduction.

Mass reproduction relied on the technology being available. The moment it became possible to produce photographs using ink on paper, they would be used by newspaper and magazines. While the process had been available before the advent of the Weimar Republic, the disappearance of the imperial regime and its staid, backwards conventions opened up a way for innovations of all kinds to flourish.

In August 1919, Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (a news magazine) published a photograph of President Friedrich Ebert and Defense Minister Gustav Noske on its cover. Ebert, a social democrat (when that term still meant anything), had become President just three days earlier, taking his oath to a new constitution that had been created not in Berlin, the country’s capital that was still beset by strife, but in sleepy Weimar (past home of national hero Goethe and future home of national disgrace Buchenwald), giving the new Republic its name.

But the photo the editors had chosen was not one that could have been published under the previous imperial regime. Ebert and Noske had been photographed at the beach. They’re seen knee deep in water, posing somewhat awkwardly for the photographer (there is a third man in the picture who is mostly submerged and who holds up a pitchfork — clearly intending to play the role of Neptune).

Ebert and Noske’s paunchy figures and swimming trunks do not necessarily make for the most flattering look — this much is clear even today, over 100 years later. It’s difficult to fully assess the impact the photograph and its publication might have had at the time, though: ours is a world flooded with photographs, and we have seen our leaders in all kinds of flattering and unflattering situations. The Weimar Republic citizens had not.

In fact, Germany’s last emperor, the hapless Wilhelm II, had been born with birth defects, which included not only mild brain damage but also a left arm that was noticeably shorter than the right one. If you know about this, you can see the man’s efforts to conceal the fact in official photographs. But it would have been unthinkable for a news magazine to publish a corresponding photograph such as the one on the cover of Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung in August 1919.

Before 1918, it would have been unthinkable for an artist to take the cover photograph, use it for their own art work, and show it. But that’s exactly what Hannah Höch did when she created Staatshäupter (Heads of State), one of her earliest collages (you can find it included in this article). She cut out the two figures from the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung cover and put them on top of an embroidery pattern.

At the time, Höch was engaged in the world of dada. But Staatshäupter is not dada: it’s a clearly political piece of art, created in response to the photograph on the cover of a news magazine but probably also in response to ensuing discussions around it.

One could view the publication of the Ebert/Noske photograph on the cover of a news magazine as an explicit criticism of the newly formed republic. After all, the dignity of the office of president was hardly reflected therein. One could also view the photograph as the beginning of a new era, an era of democracy where even the country’s leaders were like the rest of us, enjoying their time at the beach and possibly not looking presentable according to the old conventions that took a little longer than the emperor to leave the country.

But Höch’s work of art was something else. Replicating either one of the two possibilities discussed above would have been too simple. It’s not that doing so would have created a form of agitprop. It would have been the wrong kind of agitprop.

The newly formed Weimar Republic had granted women the right to vote, a first in Germany’s history. True gender equality still remained only a pipe dream for women (today’s Germany has made progress, but it’s still a pipe dream). However, the explicit recognition that women should have the same say in choosing their country’s leaders as men was a clear and long overdue acknowledgement of the fact that women’s roles had been artificially restricted.

By placing the head of state and his defense minister on an embroidery pattern, Höch effectively placed them in her female world. Obviously, much like not all men have powerful roles in government not all women use embroidery. What Höch was playing with with her kitchen knife (to adopt a short phrase from the title of her most widely known piece of art; reproduced in part above) were symbols: photographs and visual materials both as source material for a new object and as stand ins for larger concepts.

In other words and using today’s language, Staatshäupter appropriates source material to create a new, different meaning, a meaning envisioned by the person creating it. And that meaning was tied to a form of criticism only possible in the arts, a criticism that arises solely from the juxtaposition of visuals that ordinarily are not seen together.

You will want to keep these two key aspects in mind — the juxtaposition/synthesis of visual material and the clear intent of criticism.

Given the possibilities provided by photomontage, it is not surprising to understand how this new form of visual culture became widely used in the Weimar Republic. Other artists embraced it — László Moholy-Nagy included it in his treatises around visual arts.

John Heartfield employed montage to devastating effect. Born Helmut Herzfeld (he changed his name as a protest against strong anti-British sentiments during the final imperial years), the artist would end up as number five of the Gestapo’s most-wanted list for his work: a ruthless and biting anti-fascism that had, for example, an anonymous industrialist put large wads of cash into Hitler’s hand.

A lot of Heartfield’s work is agitprop. And yet, since it is critical it is art. For example, his Der alte Wahlspruch im “neuen” Reich: Blut und Eisen (The Slogan of the “new” Reich: Blood and Iron) takes two prominent fascist concepts, blood and iron, to form a swastika out of four butcher’s axes, blood still dripping from their blades. It’s crude, sure, but it’s effective — and if things had gone badly (as they did for some other artists), his art could have cost Heartfield his life (he managed to escape the Nazis).

Many of Heartfield’s montages ended up on covers of left-wing magazines, thus completing the circle that Höch had started. Given the many contradictions and contrasting impulses that existed in the Weimar Republic (and that would ultimately doom it), you could argue that montage was its defining art form. Not photography, not film, no, it was the montaging of images to create new images that exemplified the time — and that would also foreshadow much later, postmodern thinking.

But montage was not only used in the Weimar Republic. Totalitarian regimes such as the Soviet Union or fascist Japan produced publications in which montage played a prominent role. It’s instructive to compare Soviet or Japanese montages with Weimarian ones: the techniques and ideas are the same. But since Soviet or Japanese montages were largely made with the idea of creating propaganda in mind, there is little artistic value to them.

Montage thrives when it is employed in a critical fashion; when it is used for propaganda, it falls flat pretty quickly.

Roughly one hundred years later, montage is not used all that much any longer. But it has not vanished completely. Christopher Spencer (who goes by Cold War Steve) has been treading in John Heartfield’s footsteps for years, using similar techniques while expanding the approach. Often relying on classical paintings as starting points, with today’s tools Spencer could create much more seamless images than he does.

I would argue that the visibility of the montage forms the core of why his images are so potent. The obscenity of much of what is being criticized by these montages in part reveals itself through the crassness with which Spencer splices together his raw material. It’s extremely effective. If I were someone who believed in an afterlife, I would probably imagine Heartfield and Höch smiling about their successor.

That all said, none of the above is the focus of this essay. What I really want to try to understand is something that has been pointed out by Roland Meyer, Professor in Digital Cultures and Arts at University of Zurich and Zurich University of the Arts. Through his writings and social-media presence, Meyer has become my go-to person for discussions around what has become known as generative artificial intelligence (GAI) image making.

A quick note first. I do not believe that the inclusion of the term “intelligence” in that string of words makes sense. Unless you define intelligence in an extremely narrow sense, what these kinds of tools do does not in fact qualify as artificial intelligence. Obviously, there’s a reason why the makers of the tools use the term: it’s to essentially shut down part of possible discussions. After all who wants to argue against intelligence?

Going forward, I will continue using the term for one and only one reason: I do not believe that the arguments I want to make are being served by defining my own term for the tools in question. People such as Roland Meyer are much more well suited to come up with meaningful descriptors; and unfortunately, most of the debates have uncritically used the term.

One of my main grievances around the debates I have seen is that they discuss GAI on its own terms, regardless of whether the economics behind it are concerned (essentially large-scale thievery of other people’s work) or the resulting images themselves. As someone who has a large interest in visual culture, I believe that you can’t discuss GAI images without placing it into the larger visual context. And that context has be larger than merely the contemporary one.

Here then is part of the reason why I discussed montage in so much detail above. I believe that montage and GAI have enough aspects in common for them to be discussed in relation to each other. Obviously, I am not claiming that montage and GAI are the same. There are considerable technical differences; but these differences are largely irrelevant for what I am going to discuss.

In many articles and interviews, Meyer has spoken about the fact that GAI tools serve nostalgia and that they’re amplifiers of cliches. One of the topics that also has come up is the question why GAI tools, in particular image tools, have been so widely used by the far right. Why is that? I have been trying to understand possible reasons for some time.

Many people refuse to use GAI for exactly the same reason that I refuse to use it: it relies on stolen material. But there are two problems with that approach. First, if GAI image making served people outside of the far right just as much, a lot more people would use it.

I do not want to imply that people are callous or don’t care about the problem of the thievery. After all, we live in a day and age where it’s almost impossible to remain pure, given the extent with which neoliberal capitalism has salted the fields. Whether it’s being able to shop for groceries that aren’t wrapped in enormous amounts of plastic or staying clear of bio-engineered food items or only using corporations that do not cause massive harm — it’s very, very hard to steer around whatever one has a problem with.

Thus, at least in theory GAI images could be used to combat fascism. But they’re not — because they can’t do the job. Why exactly is that?

Second, to phrase it in a crass fashion, montage relies on stolen images just as much as GAI. Hannah Höch “stole” images just as much as John Heartfield did. In the past decades, the world of art has spent considerable effort on trying to understand and/or define why or how it can be OK to use someone else’s work. Whether or not I buy all of the ideas and/or explanations brought up so far is besides the point here.

The point is that despite their technical differences, montage and GAI rely on appropriation. I wanted to understand why I’m OK with Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and Christopher Spencer — but not with GAI images. Isn’t this hypocritical?

I told myself that the answer had to go beyond the fact that one side mostly represents the fascists whereas the other side does not. Even though I have enormous problems with fascism, it felt unsatisfactory to me to remain at that level.

So why does the far right rely on GAI so much?

The first aspect that seems important to me is that contemporary fascism does not have a continuity of visual representation of their ideology. After 1945, the production of such imagery largely ceased because of the huge stigma associated with it. Fascists did not disappear. But in most countries I am aware of there was societal agreement that fascism was not acceptable, whether politically or culturally.

That agreement has now been shattered. Still, you did not have, say, German citizens (whether artists or whoever else) create and celebrate fascist art after 1945. Or rather, there was art that used fascist ideas, but it was not seen and/or discussed in such a context. Essentially, the contemporary far-right has to create their visuals starting from scratch.

In addition, the far right does not have any talented artists to work with. There’s a simple reason: true good art lives from working with uncertainty and doubt, and the far right rejects both of those. The contemporary far right is mostly driven by dissatisfied and extremely insecure males who nurture their largely imaginary grievances among themselves. Those males suffer from being unable to process their own uncertainty and doubt.

For fascists, uncertainty and doubt are signs of weakness — and thus to be rejected. Thus, there can be no true far-right art. Whatever far-right art might exist conforms to very broad conventions of art, but in terms of even the loosest sense of art criticism, it’s laughably bad. If you don’t believe me, just watch this short video (please note: the video is in equal part funny and deeply disturbing).

Far-right ideology expressly rejects proper criticism (whether the art kind or any other) and, instead, replaces it with a phony simulation. Its art reflects this basic fact.

For what it’s worth, you can say the same about any kind of totalitarian ideology. Were the Soviet Union still around, its leaders would still embrace the same restrictions on art. Totalitarian regimes in general do not support freedom of the arts. (If you look at the visual representations employed by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, you see very clear similarities: the heroic leader, the very traditional family unit composed of extremely attractive members, the power of the state as expressed through its military might, etc.)

In addition, unlike communism fascism does not have an actual vision of the future. Fascism only offers an imaginary, idealized view of a national past as its ideal. In other words, whatever vision this might be — it has nothing to do with a better future. Instead, the idealized future is merely a rehash of the past.

In other words, fascism does not have to truly imagine what might exist. Instead, it only has to imagine what might exist again, a possibly slightly modernized version of the past (modernized of course only in terms of amenities, not in terms of thinking or culture). Even the imaginary communities envisioned by far-right tech billionaires (whether on Mars, in Greenland, or Gaza) are ultimately little more than the romantic villages from an (again largely) imaginary past.

In an artistic sense, fascism thus does not offer a vision — whereas true art relies on a person’s vision to imagine something different, something better, something that — for the art to be truly good — might not be fully formed and might embody contradictory impulses.

All of the above makes GAI image generators that rely on past, existing images as their source material ideal tools for the fascist project. The many restrictions that most artist rightfully see in that tool are not an actual problem for fascists: it’s not that there’s no need for contradictory impulses, it’s that such contradictions are inacceptable. (It’s absolutely no coincidence that Hitler started out as a really bad artist.)

Thus the nostalgia detected in GAI images by Roland Meyer is absolutely not innocent. By itself, nostalgia is not necessarily a good entity to begin with, given the extent with which one’s imagination shapes and distorts the past one is nostalgic for. But in the hands of the fascists, this nostalgia becomes menacing; and as we’re witnessing all over the world, this nostalgia manifests itself in actual violence.

It is absolutely no surprise that once GAI tools were able to create Studio Ghibli style imagery, American fascists immediately used them to create images depicting violence. Without violence and domination fascism would not exist. And any tool that makes the creation of imagery depicting violence and domination so easy is custom-made for fascism.

On a more technical level, whereas montage not only celebrates but also works with the many artifacts inherent in it — mismatched sizes of people’s figures, say — in GAI images, artifacts undermine them. A GAI image becomes less believable when someone has six fingers on their hand.

In a montage, an artifact is a feature; in GAI, it’s a mistake. Given that GAI strives to avoid mistakes, I can’t see how any self-respecting artist would choose to use it. Good art lives from uncertainty and mistakes — exactly the things the makers of GAI attempt to get rid off.

Lastly, the inherent smoothing employed by GAI that has so many photorealistic images look so similar is mirrored by the largely identical look adopted by the far right. If you watch any Fox News program, say — it is as if the people in front of the camera had agreed to run a smoothing filter over themselves to create a very limited version of what a man or woman might look like. It’s deeply disturbing, of course, in part because it brings Nazi Germany imagery back to life.

As became clear this past week when suddenly the “X” (formerly Twitter) chatbot started going on rants about “white genocide” in South Africa (story; it’s difficult to keep up with this, though, given it has since pivoted to Holocaust denial), many GAI tools have become tools that serve fascism.

It’s clear from what’s going on on “X” (now the equivalent of a Nazi bar) and from the company’s response that the actual problem was not that the chatbot would produce far-right conspiracy theories; the problem was that it would do so in a fashion that made the site and its far-right owner look bad.

It’s doubtful whether Hannah Höch really used a kitchen knife for her work as the title of one of her most important montages implied; what is clear, though, is that she wanted to tell her viewers about the fact a woman had done the work.

Whether it was a kitchen knife or scissors — these tools allowed her full control over what she made. With today’s GAI, anyone using it cedes large parts of such control — and puts it into the hands of people like Elon Musk. A tool might not reveal its makers’ biases quite as openly as the “X” chatbot did; but they’re there, and they are outside of the control of possible users.

In light of so many tech companies having embraced far-right ideas, it’s absolutely clear that GAI tools are not the equivalent of Höch’s kitchen knife. Instead, they’re the equivalent of the butcher’s axes in Heartfield anti-Nazi montage.

The starting point of Yumna Al-Arashi‘s Aisha is a photographic erasure. The photographer has three portraits of her great-grandmother, Aisha, that were made in Yemen some time between 1950 and 1970. In each one of them (one is reproduced on the book’s cover), there is something missing. Aisha had a facial tattoo that does not show up in any of the three photographs. “There was a straight line running from the middle of her bottom lip to the end of her chin,” Al-Arashi writes.

“The placement of the tattoos carries meaning,” an article about facial tattooing by the Amazigh tribes of Algeria, Kurdish communities in Mesopotamia and the Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula informs me, “for example, a vertical line on the chin marks an engagement, whereas a mark at the tip of the nose could symbolise either a marriage or the death of a child.”

It’s easy to see how the arrival of modernity (however you want to define it) would have put an end to the custom. This happened all over the world at many different times, whether it was, for example, early Christians rooting out pagan rituals across Europe (and, later, beyond), societies on the path of what they considered advances putting an end to traditions, or colonizers doing the same with rituals of the societies they took over (such as when traditional tattoos in what became known as Okinawa were banned by the Japanese).

Customs and traditions were lost, many of them forever.

The loss of a custom isn’t quite the same as the loss of the knowledge around it, though. You can preserve knowledge or possibly re-discover it. But it’s not as straightforward to preserve the social and cultural meanings of a custom, let alone to re-discover or revive it. Usually, what has been smashed cannot be put back together again; what has arisen out of centuries of people being with other people cannot be rebuilt.

The photographs in Aisha were taken in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Al-Arashi traveled the lands looking for women with these traditional tattoos. When Al-Arashi found one, she photographed her, but she also listened the the particular stories she encountered, stories about the tattoos and what they meant and/or what function they served (on the back of the book, there is a list of names, but “many of the women preferred their names and family names not to be published.”)

There is, of course, that other aspect: photography. Photography is not an innocent tool when you move with your camera through lands in which different cameras had been used for nefarious ends (colonial or otherwise). Al-Arashi struggles with this aspect of her work. “I’ve been given the language of an oppressor,” she writes, “and the tools of a criminal.”

And yet, she realizes that “find[ing] a way to create beauty with a gun” offers the way out: “you’ll be set free”. A few pages later in the book: “This story is an earnest attempt to recover / to heal / to honor”. And then: “This story which was mine is now yours”.

Photography can serve oppression, but it also can be a tool to do the opposite.

Photographically, one of the most important aspects of the book is that it refuses to operate along the lines of the precious picture (I wrote about how this approach to photography has been bothering me five years ago). There are multiple photographs for the many women Al-Arashi encountered and spoke with, and they’re presented on equal footing one after the other.

Crucially, no attempt at photographic cleverness was employed. If as a viewer who might be used to looking for a favourite (or best) picture you were engage in that endeavour here — picking that favourite or best one — you’d be missing the point. The women are not intended to be viewed as specimen, located by some photographer and then presented to an audience that is far removed.

Instead, as a viewer, you get to spend time with these women (or rather their photographs, but an attempt is made to blur that distinction), and through the photographs you get a glimpse into their worlds. In between, you might see part of their surroundings or you see the land pass by as the photographers is traversing it. Often, it’s not clear where one photograph ends and a different one begins, and that is a nifty device.

Looking through Aisha, I was reminded of Mariela Sancari‘s Moisés, an equally powerful book that employs some of the same strategies. In both cases, what comes across most powerfully is the photographers’ desire to get closer to a person they now have no direct access to any longer. And it is that desire more than anything else that leaves the longest lasting impression on an observer (well, at least on this one, given that your mileage might vary).

This, in the end, is the reason why you want to break with the academy’s convention of the precious picture: because you desperately want to get closer to something that ultimately will remain beyond your reach forever.

Photography might contain the tools of a criminal, and the camera might be a gun.

But photographs — your own or other people’s — can still break your heart in so many different ways.

Highly recommended.

Aisha; photographs and text by Yumna Al-Arashi; 392 pages; Edition Patrick Frey; 2024 (1st edition)/2025 (2nd edition)

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In a recent article on masculinity, Toby Buckle uses words and photographs by Chris Arnade as a starting point for a dissection of a common encountered talking point, namely that masculinity is under attack. This is nonsense, he writes: “there has never been a better time to be a man”.

In passing, Buckle describes how he sees Arnade’s work: “Chris Arnade’s entire project is a sort of voyeuristic ventriloquism: gawping at, and speaking for, people who he imagines can’t speak for themselves.” While there are additional comments about the photographer’s work, this particular sentence struck me.

It struck me not so much because of Arnade’s work, which I have not spent much time with (for the reasons outlined in the article). It struck me because you could use the exact same description for a large section of what we see in the world of photography: a “voyeuristic ventriloquism: gawping at, and speaking for, people who [the photographer] imagines can’t speak for themselves.”

The idea, which also frequently gets voiced in the world of photojournalism, has long bugged me. I’m the kind of person who gets really angry when other people try to speak for me. And I’ve always transferred my own feelings onto other people as well, imagining that other people would get mad if someone else spoke for them.

Why should anyone feel the need to speak for someone who, in their own ways, is perfectly capable of speaking for themselves?

Obviously, the modes of speaking might differ. Few people speak by taking photographs and then sharing them either in the form of big, expensive prints in big, expensive frames or by putting them into what in the larger scheme of things are overpriced books (aka photobooks). Few people have access to the outlets photojournalists get their pictures published in.

But simply because someone can’t get their photographs into a showroom where rich people buy decorations for their homes or into art museums or onto news websites does not mean that they’re somehow mute, that, in other words, they can’t speak for themself and thus need someone else, typically a privileged outsider, to do it for them.

There is an assumption behind all of this, namely that a gallery/museum, a photobook, or a news site carries with itself a specific form of power: Only when you’re able to show your photographs (or words) in those particular contexts are you able to speak for yourself.

It is as if one needed to be anointed in some strange fashion that, ultimately, is tied to a very specific form of power (tied to money).

I certainly do not want to throw out the baby with the bathwater here. There is a reason why I have spent so many years engaging with photography in the particular contexts I mentioned above. I do see value in doing that (in fact, I spent thousands of dollars to get two photobooks published).

But I have always found it so incredibly problematic to tie the context that I usually refer to as photoland to the only or the true way of expressing oneself. It simply is not.

This is why I absolutely do not share photoland’s frequent disdain of the selfie culture, of people photographing and sharing their food on social media, or any of the other supposed ills that people who call themselves photography critics, curators, professors, or whatever else bemoan.

Photography is a practice that is much wider and richer than what is encountered in galleries/museums, photobooks, or on news sites; to belittle people excited about photography as shallow or narcissistic because they essentially aren’t doing what the academy decrees is elitist. And gross.

There is a larger problem behind all of this. In essence, photoland (in which I include its well-off patrons) has created a form of unspoken contract centered on the idea that photographers (fine art or otherwise, but certainly not those amateurs) act as proxies for the rest of the world: only through the hands of a photographer can the world be seen and appreciated.

The audience of such photography not only accepts it as the only and true vision of the world. It also outsources at least part of their conscience to the photographers. The photographers have to take on the role of their audience’s conscience, and most of them do so gladly.

The ills of the world are not very well hidden, and neither is its beauty. It does not take eyes with years of training to see. If, say, you walk past an unhoused person, you do not need a photographer to take their picture, hang it in a white cube, and then invite you to look at this artifact to feel that something is wrong.

But this mechanism, with all of its added steps, is how it works: Outsource your conscience, then buy a token of it being exercised to engage with a typically heavily aestheticized expression of the conscience in action.

And it’s art, and art is not real life; it’s an aspiration that allows for the keeping of the expression of conscience at a large enough mental distance that actual, real-life consequences can be held off (plus the poster of the disadvantaged person might just look great over the couch).

In essence, this mechanism is little more than a contemporary equivalent of the selling of indulgences that was so popular in the Middle Ages (where you could literally pay a priest off if you wanted to engage in sinful activities): As a buyer you exchange money for a visual token of your conscience being exercised by a different person, and you can display that token for effect (even though in the context of neoliberal capitalism mere ownership already confers status).

The reality is that the outsourcing of conscience is a bad deal for everyone. It is a bad deal for the audience who can run away from their own ethical and societal responsibilities — until the accumulated contradictions and problems have become so large that fascists start knocking on doors.

And it’s an especially bad deal for photographers, because not only do they have to do someone else’s mental work, more often than not they also accept responsibility for something they’re mostly not responsible for.

If, to pick an example, you create photography around unhoused people, the responsibility for the fact that the unhoused people in your pictures do not have a place to live in is not completely yours. You might have a part in it, but your part is not any different than that of most other people in the society you live in.

But by creating that project and presenting it in the photoland context, and by accepting the outsourcing of your audience’s conscience, you’re essentially exposing yourself to their rage about what you show them.

Their rage should be directed at the general conditions that create a situation where people cannot afford to pay for a home. Instead, they now blame you, the photographer, for showing them.

We see this procedure in place all the time. The history of photography is filled with examples of photographers getting the sole blame for something they depicted in their pictures.

And the procedure can get pretty obscene, such as when (a recent example) a German journalist commented on a prize winning photograph of a mother in Gaza cradling the wrapped body of her dead child that Palestinians know how to be photogenic victims, implying that somehow, the problem was the photograph — and not the fact that the journalist’s country was and still is actively supporting the conditions for such photography by providing the weapons used to create them.

It is, after all, a lot easier to blame a photographer for showing something one directly or indirectly is responsible for than to have a hard look in the mirror and accept one’s own responsibility.

As I already wrote, this is a lousy deal for every person involved: instead of dealing with the real problem, the discussion now resolves around a proxy, a set of photographs created by a specific person. And if push comes to shove, the photographer has to accept the blame, often because s/he is the only person available.

As lousy a deal as it might be for the audience, it’s a convenient one: the audience does not have to think about their own part. Instead of dealing with their own mental contradictions and their own guilt over something they possibly would like to change but that they’re too lazy, too distracted, too powerless to, they can talk about the manifestation of their outsourced conscience.

I think in the world of economics, this idea is typically described as externalization. By accepting to act according to an audience’s outsourced conscience, a photographer also accepts the costs.

Obviously, this can be a lucrative deal, given that most photography projects are never critically discussed. Collectors will happily pay thousands of dollars for a glorified poster to hang over their couch, without batting an eye over what they’re actually looking at (often picturesque poverty). And selected photojournalists will be flown to Amsterdam so their helicoptered in wares of people in distress can be admired in a beautiful setting.

What gets me about all of this is not only the fact that obviously, this mechanism will never lead to any meaningful change in the world (the photoland system basically sustains itself).

There also is the fact that the underlying premise, part of which is so aptly described by Toby Buckle as “voyeuristic ventriloquism”, is so perverse.

I know and have met a lot of people in photoland, and there actually is a lot of good will and an absolutely sincere desire to make a difference (whatever that might look like for individual photographers). But I’ve also found that thoughtfulness does not automatically translate into thoughtful pictures. Many people subscribe to the idea of voyeuristic ventriloquism.

How have we become stuck in this web, where the way the system works not only neuters our aspirations but also renders us toothless?

Why do we maintain this contract, according to which photographers take on the outsourced conscience of an audience that does not want to deal with its own discomfort (or, possibly, is incapable of doing so)?

A possible attempt to change things might start out with refusal: photographers have to refuse to act as someone else’s conscience.

Photographers also have to refuse to believe in their own bullshit (as if magically their own camera can solve a problem that all those other cameras in the past have been unable to solve).

Photographers have to refuse to speak for other people who supposedly are unable to speak for themselves.

The fact that there is so much photography made around (or with) underprivileged people does not mean that there is meaningful interest in learning from photographs to create change. Instead, it means that the photographs serve as convenient tokens to signal concern — while in actuality, no efforts are being made to change anything.

The fact there there is so little photography made around (or with) rich people does not mean that they’re not of interest. Instead, it means that they can arrange for silence around their privilege, a silence that serves to prevent us from addressing the vast inequality we see all around us.

What people call compassion fatigue is not an affliction of photography. Instead, it’s a collective moral failure. Photographers must not take on responsibility for that moral failure with/in their work (of course as individuals, their task is to face their own moral responsibilities).

Photographers struggled for such a long time to have photography accepted as an art form. But the context of art, however lucrative it might be for many people, is not a meaningful context if anything is supposed to get better. It is walled garden of visual impotence, especially when viewed in relation to the general relevance that photography has today.

Photography is arguably the most widely used medium, and yet many photographers struggle to get their messages across.

It would be too absurd a situation to imagine if it didn’t exist already.

Photography is not interesting because of what it shows; it is interesting because of what it does. By that I mean its uncanny ability to trigger ideas, thoughts, and memories in ways that are largely outside of our own control.

That’s why debates around what critics have called compassion fatigue are such a dead end. Those debates only focus on what photographs show (as terrible as that might be). Crucially, they assume that human beings are simplistic creatures that can be swayed by a photographer’s (or editor’s) intentions — as if those were magically present in the photographs. And when that doesn’t work, it’s somehow the viewers’ fault.

In reality, our minds are more complicated than that, and for all kinds of reasons (some good, some bad) we might not be swayed the way someone intended us to be.

In essence, photographs might move us for reasons nobody could have foreseen — not a photographer or editor, and certainly not we ourselves. If it were otherwise, photography would only be a blunt propaganda tool (which, of course, it sometimes is — just not most of the time).

It was telling that years ago, when I occasionally asked students working towards an MFA whether they were looking for beauty, every single one of them recoiled in horror (a horror usually barely hidden behind a mask of politeness). Beauty was suspicious, something not to be touched.

After a while, I figured out that it was probably because you can’t control beauty or will it into being. But beauty also was something those outside of the narrow confines of the art school might appreciate (the frequent rejection of an appreciation of beauty in the world of art is little more than barely disguised elitism).

Of course, beauty is everywhere in photography (usually just not where MFA students want it to be), and it plays a crucial role in undermining our critical facilities to make us face truths about ourselves that we’d rather not deal with.

I had to think of all of the above when trying to find out why Pas de culte, a new book created by Róman Kienjet and Willem van Zoetendaal moved me so deeply. A collection of photographs of places of worship (the majority of them Christian churches), sourced from various Dutch collections and archives — I would not have imagined I might even be interested in this.

In the end, it probably comes down to a set of factors. Many of the photographs reminded me of the kinds of structures I would see near where I was born, the locale I grew up in. What is now the northwest of Germany visually is very similar to larger parts of the Netherlands (it is, in fact, part of a larger structure called Frisia).

In this relatively featureless flat land that for centuries has been beaten down by strong winds and occasional storms (that up until not so long ago brought regular flooding), many of the churches in the many little hamlets and towns in the countryside are bulky and sturdy. In essence, they’re hunkering down in advance.

If you drive across the land, you’ll spot the next hamlet first by seeing the top of its church. Anyone familiar with landscape paintings from the Dutch Golden Age will be familiar with this: within the somewhat nondescript land and the vast expense of sky, you’ll occasionally spot a church which will guide your eye towards the city it is a part of.

Pas de culte shows you some pictures of what this kind of landscape has been looking like ever since photographers arrived on the scene. In addition, there are many other pictures of churches (and other houses of worship) that bring you closer to details, whether it’s their facades or their typically bare bones interiors.

As I noted, I was born into this protestant landscape. I realized many years ago (as a teenager in fact) that I never believed in the Christian god and the various stories around them. At first, this realization felt like a small crisis (in particular since it happened during the “classes” I had to take for what was called confirmation).

With a little time, I was able to shake the mental shackles of the Christian thought that had been embedded in my mind. The faith that I was born into but that I did not have became just another one of the things tied to a past long gone.

But here was this familiarity, triggered by the visuals of the stout churches in small Dutch hamlets that can be found in Pas de culte. I was reminded of the wind, of the sparseness of the land; I was reminded of how the land’s unforgiving nature had carved deep lines into the minds of the people living there, how it took me many years to shed those lines to instead embrace my current more forgiving self.

And then there’s the beauty, or maybe rather the aspiration towards it — not so much the beauty of the buildings (your mileage might vary) but beauty as an ideal to strive for: the beauty of a life lived in community with other human beings that are seen and treated as equals.

Even as Christianity has fallen woefully short of its own central message (and continues to do so every single day), the aspiration itself is beautiful, and it also hints at the beauty our world could take on if we all adopted the idea (the idea, not the religion).

Seen that way, beauty becomes subversive (and maybe that’s also why those MFA students were so eager to run away from it): beauty reminds us of how flawed we are as human beings, and of how little we often do to attend to those flaws in an attempt to at least reduce their numbers.

I don’t have to describe how in this particular moment, as the worst human instincts have taken over our body politic, wrecking havoc with people’s lives and well being, the idea of beauty has its most political moment: to insist on beauty is to resist.

And resist we must.

Highly recommended.

Pas de culte; photographs by Pieter Oosterhuis, G.H. Breitner, Alfred Stieglitz, Adolph Mulder, Ed van der Elsken, and numerous others; edited by Róman Kienjet and Willem van Zoetendaal; introduction by Róman Kienjet; interviews with Marinus Boezem, Paul Kooiker, Marc Mulders, Fiona Tan; 288 pages; Van Zoetendaal; 2025

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Different generations of artists often define themselves through opposition: as a new generation emerges, it attempts to set itself apart from what came before by rejecting the tradition it is forced to grow into. Whether or not the presence of larger historical and societal circumstances is needed to create revolutionary new forms of artistic expression I would not know. But in Japan in the 1960s (and to a slightly lesser extent in Germany at the same time), it was the combination of those three factors that produced some of the country’s most inventive contemporary art.

By the 1960s, Japan’s political establishment had created the model that it would continue to ride up until today: offer citizens unprecedented material advances in such a fashion that they will not ask for a change in the political structure. The first major expression of the model was produced for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games, which saw vast parts of Tokyo re-constructed and connected to some of the rest of the country through the now famous shinkansen (bullet train).

Just like in Germany, the economy exploded, making many previous luxury items widely available. It was the beginning of the consumerism that, for better or worse, has shaped Japan ever since. Meanwhile, about a century after the country had opened itself back up to the world the struggle between modernity (often in the form of imports from abroad) and tradition continued unabated.

The continued presence of American military forces in the country predictably created unrest: there were large student protests against the re-signing of what as known as ANPO, the United States–Japan Security Treaty that in part outsourced Japan’s defense to the US but that also provided the US with a convenient military base from which to wage its war in Vietnam (earlier in Korea).

For the artists who had experienced World War 2 either as adolescents or children, growing up into this particular world created a unique opportunity. But maybe this phrasing assumes that as a participant of an event you have more agency than you actually do. After all, none of the artists portrayed in Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers, a new documentary, appeared to have considered their position with a bird’s eye view.

And how could they? Theirs were unique circumstances, and they made the best of them. We know this because Moriyama Daidō, Hosoe Eikoh, Ishiuchi Miyako, Tanaami Keiichi, Yokoo Tadanori, Terayama Shūji, Kawada Kikuji, and others speak about their experiences and ideas in the documentary. Some of the footage is archival (for example Terayama Shūji already died in 1983), while the bulk of it is new.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many of the artists either knew each other, or at least they knew of each other. Occasionally, they would collaborate to create pieces of art together, such as when, say, Hosoe Eikoh photographed Mishima Yukio, the extremely image conscious writer, actor, poet, and far-right nationalist, to produce what became known as Barakei (Ordeals by Roses).

The importance of being able to see these Japanese artists speak about their work and motivations cannot be overstated, given the extent with which it enriches appreciation for what they achieved. Sadly, as is usually the case the photographers provide the least interesting examples, possibly because so many of them are stuck in only their own medium (Kawada Kikuji is the notable exception).

For me, the most visceral experiences were seeing contemporary footage of art pieces that until now I had only heard about, such as when, for example, Natsuyuki Nakanishi boarded Tokyo’s Yamanote Line, dressed in a suit and his face painted white, to then hang an object he had made from the subway’s hand guards, examining it with a flashlight (as part of what became known as Hi-Red Center). It was performance art at its finest, and the footage is a real sight to behold.

Seeing Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo perform Butoh dances (in incredibly grainy footage) also was a revelation. There are, of course, photographs (Hijikata collaborated with Hosoe to produce Kamaitachi in the region of Japan they were both from). But it became clear to me how little they can convey of what an audience might have actually experienced in person, in part because through its own nature photography freezes out the essence of this type of dance.

Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers adds context to what is on view through interviews with an assortment of Western curators. I suppose without that added context, an audience unfamiliar with what is on view might be lost. But there were some amusing moments, such as when a clearly very privileged Guggenheim curator spoke of the preciousness of some of the art that had been lost, and a Japanese artist would say right after how as a starting point for his art he had rejected that very idea.

Speaking about joining the student protests, Ishiuchi Miyako says “we were freer then.”If there’s anything a viewer takes away from the documentary it is that freedom — and the willingness to make good use of it.

For what it’s worth, I would have preferred a dedicated section on Ishiuchi instead of on Araki Nobuyoshi, the pervy old man of Japanese photography. At this stage, Nobuyoshi Araki is the Nigel Tufnel of Japanese photography, forever dialing up the misogyny to an 11 — except, of course, that Tufnel is a fictional, comedic character.

But maybe seeing Araki serves as a good reminder that art and photography are made by human beings, and human beings reflect their own and their society’s flaws. Mishima Yukio produced incredible art, pushing the boundaries in any number of ways — only to end his life via ritualistic suicide after an attempt to stage a putsch against Japan’s government failed (the whole event has always stuck me as so outlandish and absurd that I could never shake the thought that Mishima knew that it would not succeed).

If anything, Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers not only shows that the artists it showcases produced some of the most cutting-edge contemporary art of the 20th Century; it also exposes the wide range of personalities behind that art — and the sheer wit that drove so many to reinvent themselves and part of their country.

Highly recommended.

Japanese Avant-Garde Pioneers; directed by Amélie Ravalec; 1 hour 40 minutes; Circle Time Studio; 2025

Released in theaters from April 2025, with screenings planned throughout the year internationally; please refer to this page for screenings.

When I grew up, the story I was told about the country I had been born into was that the Nazis had ruled it until 1945, causing terrible destruction and murder on the largest possible scales — and then they were gone. They had not merely stopped being in power: they were literally gone. At least that was the story. Nobody had had any involvement with the Nazis. In fact nobody had known anything.

For example, the next-door neighbour who would spend all day looking out of the window, glaring at everyone and everything in his view, and who, or so I was told, had a metal plate in his head was just to be left alone. That neighbour might have been the closest I have ever come to meeting an actual former Nazi.

But then who knows whether he had been one. He might have simply done his duty like many Germans. That explanation was offered when someone found himself in the position that he was unable to explain away his presence in the Nazis’ murderous machinery (such as the Chancellor who had been an artillery officer and who had just done that: his duty). And who knows how many former Nazis I met without realizing in whose presence I was.

Already when I was very young, I found all of this very fishy, especially given how the lack of knowledge or responsibility was applied in a very selective fashion. The same very competent people who clearly knew how to go about their lives and jobs turned into the complete opposite any time the Nazi era was brought up.

It wasn’t even so much that I was curious about the Nazis per se. I was not and still am not particularly interested in the lives of strangers. And yet, there have always been those nagging questions for me: why had they done what they had done? How was this even possible? The crimes committed by Nazi Germany were so monstrous that it was inconceivable to me how anyone would be willing to take part in them, however small or large their role might have been.

Over the course of the past thirty years, historical research produced many findings that confirmed that my suspicions had in fact been correct: Many people had known, and many people had played their parts. Most of them had managed to evade being held responsible for what they had done or what they had contributed to.

With Hitler’s People, historian Richard J. Evans dives yet again into the Nazi era, this time to look into its most well known and a number of lesser known characters. “Only by examining individual personalities and their stories,” he writes, ” can we reach an understanding of the perverted morality that made and sustained the Nazi regime, and, by doing so, perhaps learn some lessons for the troubled era in which we live.” (p. xii)

Evans starts from the very top, Hitler himself, and makes his way down to smaller and smaller characters, even as their depravity and crimes do not in fact get much smaller. For example on page 375, we encounter Karl Brandt, the physician responsible for Aktion T-4, the organized murder of people deemed to have lives not worth living. In the end, up to 200,00 people suffering from various types of mental illness or with conditions such as cerebral palsy had been killed.

Brandt was an easy person to understand and detest: in Evans’ description, he struck me as a sociopath (Evans would probably disagree with this assessment. And yet, he wrote “What was striking about Brandt’s behaviour when observing the murders was his absolute lack of compassion.” — p. 380). If Nazi Germany’s leadership and perpetrators had been composed of sociopaths, that at least would offer some explanation (however disturbing it would be).

But in Hitler’s People, Brandt is an exception. What’s striking is how many of the people described by Evans came from rather prosaic middle-class (or lower middle-class) backgrounds. There are themes emerging here and there, such as shock over Germany’s loss in World War I, which appeared to have pushed many in the direction of radical right-wing politics.

Maybe the most insightful comment by Evans comes towards the back, in which he discusses Brandt and others. “The Nazi regime itself,” he writes, “beginning at the very top, created a moral milieu in which hyper-masculine ideas of toughness, hardness, brutality and fanaticism — all positive terms in the language of the Third Reich — encouraged the maltreatment and dehumanization of people excluded from the national community and treated as helpless and weak” (p. 398).

This is a stunning realization, especially given how Germany has prided itself for hundreds of years as the land of the poets and thinkers. Whatever you want to make of the particular circumstances of how World War 1 and the Weimar Republic conspired to create the circumstances that would result in Nazi Germany, it still is quite the jump from poets and thinkers turning into people addicted to “toughness, hardness, brutality and fanaticism” — unless, of course, “toughness, hardness, brutality and fanaticism” had been brewing underneath the surface all along.

Which obviously they had — and still are (and not just in Germany).

Having read Evans’ masterful Hitler’s People, I don’t think that I need to dive into another book to look for more answers. This book provided me with a lot of information and insight, and yet my questions mostly remained. None of it is the historian’s fault: what it comes down to is that I was and still am looking for clarity where none can be had.

I’m now convinced that I could reads hundreds of additional books about Nazi Germany, and I would still not be able to grasp how or why people contributed to it.

What I’m left with, instead, is a renewed sense of responsibility for, to re-quote Evans, “the troubled era in which we live”.

Summing up the individuals he portrayed, Evans writes that “apart from flying in the face of the evidence, thinking of them as depraved, deviant or degenerate puts them outside the bounds of normal humanity and so serves as a form of exculpation for the rest of us, past, present and future.” (p. 461, my emphasis)

Hannah Ahrendt had expressed this idea in a different form decades ago, which created a huge backlash. It would seem that we want to see monsters where they are none. Or rather: given the right circumstances, we can become monsters.

Maybe the most stunning chapter in the book is the very last one, the epilogue, in which Evans remembers meeting an anonymous elderly woman on a train ride to the Netherlands. As it turned out, she had left Nazi Germany early on because she wanted to have no part in what was unfolding in front of her. She went to Denmark, married someone there, and started her life away from the country she had been born into.

Of all the people portrayed in the book, that anonymous woman is the only one who had understood and accepted the moral choices presented to her. Everybody else had either just gone along or actively contributed — and then laying all the blame on Hitler once everything had come crashing down.

Highly recommended.

Richard J. Evans: Hitler’s People — The Faces of the Third Reich; 624 pages; Penguin Press; 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highly recommended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highly recommended.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Highly recommended.

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

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

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

Thank you for your support!

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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