Guilty Pleasures
In which I share a few videos or TV shows I've been enjoying, plus some thoughts on pictures
If you’re into metal and Andrei Tarkovsky (who isn’t?), you might enjoy the following video (I don’t remember if I shared this already).
This page informed me that the visuals are compiled from four movies: Прощание (Farewell, by Larisa Shepit’ko and Elem Klimov, 1981), Яр (Yar, by Marina Razbezhkina, 2007), Суходол (Dry Valley, by Aleksandra Strelyanaya, 2011), and Андрей Рублев (Andrei Rublev, by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1966). Whatever you might want to say about the music, the visuals editor did a terrific job.
Something completely different:
This video is already a few years old but well worth your time. It traces some of the locations in W.G. Sebald’s magnificent novel Austerlitz (please note that if you have not read the book, there are some loose spoilers in the video). In the canon of text-image pieces, Austerlitz holds a special place with a large number of photographs in a novel that very roughly could be described as having been produced by a very tempered and gentle Thomas Bernhard. If asked which of Sebald’s books I’d recommend as a first book, it is this one.
I signed up for Netflix to watch Midnight Diner. I was looking for Japanese-language movies to watch so I could listen to the language being spoken (while being able to read along the English-language subtitles). At some stage, someone recommended this show. In Japan, I had fallen in love with izakayas, which are a mix between a diner and a bar (they typically offer an assortment of small dishes plus drinks). Midnight Diner seemed like a perfect match.
To be honest, the show is maybe too endearing. There’s drama, but it’s always being dealt with. As sentimental as the show is, though, it doesn’t shy away from topics such as sex work or death. A lot of it focuses on the dreams people have or had about their lives and the reality of what happened or might happen. Each episodes ends up with the problem at hand being resolved, even though the outcomes often are very different than what you’d see in a Western show.
Every episode centres on one dish — often rather prosaic stuff. Usually, there is quite a bit of a plot, so I mostly understand only the very basics of what people are talking about. Given Japanese is so heavily dependent on social context (which might switch very quickly), the show is very useful to experience that.
Also, certain expressions are often used in seemingly very different contexts — it’s one thing to read about it, and it’s so helpful to see/hear it in action. For example, you use すみません (sumimasen) to say “excuse me” in a (somewhat) formal context. But you can also use it to say “thank you” — the idea being that when someone gives something to you, you ask them to excuse the burden you might have put on them. This sounded weird to me when I first read it. But when I saw and heard it on the screen, it started making sense to me (given the Japanese context).
I told a Japanese friend about the Midnight Diner, and she recommended Kodoku no Gurume to me. I did a little research and found out that both shows started out as manga. Apparently, there’s a market for manga that centres on people eating Japanese food. Who knew?
So far, I’ve watched only two episodes of Kodoku no Gurume. There was much less of a plot. In essence, it’s a salaryman going about his business, which somehow involves procuring unusual items for rather strange customers: such as when the owner of a shop in Yokohama asks him to find dog leashes that can compete with Louis Vuitton while expressing the spirit of the town (none of these business transactions ever get resolved). When not dealing with clients, the salaryman uses the opportunity to get some food.
Unlike Midnight Diner, Kodoku no Gurume provides serious food porn (at least the two episodes I watched so far). You really don’t want to watch it if you’re a vegetarian (from what I’ve heard being vegetarian in Japan is possible but difficult). About two thirds of the show deal with the main character thinking about, ordering, and eating food. As a viewer, you’re made to listen to his inner monologue (given there’s a lot less plot, the language seems a bit easier for me to understand; especially the inner monologue seems perfect to get to know casual Japanese better).
I never thought I’d be spending time watching Japanese shows about food, yet here I am. But then, I also love watching cooking shows, so maybe it’s not too much of a stretch (I’ve always thought you could teach a MFA photo class simply by using material from cooking shows — it’s all right there, except it’s food and not pictures).
Related, in a number of ways: New Yorker Magazine just had to publish an editor’s note under one of their pieces that stated that they had been completely duped. Actually, the piece had won a National Magazine Award in 2018, and it was about Japan’s (supposed) rent-a-family business. Ryu Spaeth wrote a very smart piece about all of this, a must-read article. Key quote:
“Here I am betraying my own biases toward a tiresome journalistic genre: the story that depicts Japan as a menagerie of the weird, the alien, the freakish. […] I don’t doubt the veracity of these stories, but I am deeply skeptical of the way they are often framed: to maximize the inherent strangeness of the Japanese. […] The picture of Japan that emerges is steeped in stereotypes of a childlike country that is so superficial, so emotionally repressed, so cowed by an overbearing society that its people would rather outsource the work of confronting their parents or reaching out to an estranged daughter—the work of being a human being.”
Even besides the context in question (Japan and written magazine journalism), the article is worth your time. In the world of photography, we often encounter the very same thing: people parachuting into communities they have very little knowledge of, to produce photo essays or books about those communities. As outlined in the article, this can — and often is — incredibly problematic.
I recently did a podcast with Brad Feuerhelm, and this topic came up in passing: how do you deal with a culture or country that is not your own but that you want to photograph, given the background you’re coming from? At some stage, I want to continue the photography I did in Poland, and for sure that’s something I will have to navigate.
Currently, though, I’m stuck in the US. For all kinds of reasons, in particular the pandemic, traveling is a very bad idea. The other day, I thought I’d continue photographing in the little town I have called my home for a while now.
After I had switched to the 4x5 aspect ratio from the square, I very quickly had realised that vertical pictures provided a very good way for me to make pictures. But horizontal ones just wouldn’t come together at all. In fact, I gave up on them for a long while.
Venturing out with my camera, I hoped I could finally deal with the problem. I can’t say that the photos I took are my favourite pictures. But something clicked, and I was able to make some horizontal pictures that I was pleased with.
There’s something about the vertical format that I enjoyed: it allowed me to frustrate the viewer’s expectations by cutting off the left and right sides, creating a sense of heightened anxiety.
With the horizontal format, it’s different; I don’t expect me to figure all things out quite yet. But the challenge of what a picture is or can be has just expanded for me. I’m grateful for that.
Here we are. It’s the end of 2020, and there’s not much more left to say about it, is there?
It’s strange, in a professional sense this year has actually been incredibly productive for me — two books and a lot of new thoughts about photography. At the same time, much like everybody else I’ve struggled with all the complications created by the pandemic.
Let’s hope that 2021 will be better for all of us. Let’s continue to look out for one another, even once the threat of the pandemic is slowly fading.
I hope you’ll stay safe and well, and I wish you all a Happy New Year!
And thank you for reading along this year.
— Jörg
I’m a freelance writer, photographer, and educator currently living and working in the US.
This Mailing List is my attempt to bring back some of the aspects that made early blogging so great -- community engagement and a more relaxed and maybe less polished approach to writing and thinking about photography. You can find the bulk of my main writing on CPhMag.com.
If you like what you read and would like to support my work, you can. Large parts of my work are fuelled by black and green tea, and I appreciate your support very much!
You can also support me by liking this email, by sharing it with others, and/or by emailing me back to tell me what you think. I'd love to hear from you!