For the past decade, I’ve been working from home. I’m used to sitting in my home “office” (really just a small, cramped room filled with books that in the winter always is too cold and in the summer always is too hot), doing the various things that comprise work for me: talking to students, working on articles or books, working on photographs…
Still, these past few weeks have felt very different. It’s not that my daily routine has changed. I work every day, maybe taking a day off on the weekend. But it’s the larger circumstances that have changed, the world at large.
I take in that world through what reaches me, and what reaches me has been reduced to a monotony of the same stuff. Every day, the news headlines are the same — endless reports of numbers of the sick and the dead (most of these numbers rising), endless reports of the bullshit spewing out of the mouth of the fascist clown who currently is the president of the US… It’s all too much.
If there’s a virus in the air, and there is (it’s killing thousands of people), there’s another one, the one poisoning our minds. And that one is of our own making.
Every once in a while, I leave the house to go for a brief walk.
(By the way, walking is slowly becoming the fancy coffee of our time: it’s being ruined by all the attention it’s getting — not that I enjoyed coffee all that much to begin with.)
I like walking but only if it’s done for a purpose, a purpose other than walking. The purpose here is to get me out of the house, and to make things more enticing I take my camera. I find my neighbourhood photographically very uninspiring, but that poses a good challenge. After all, I know that in a creative endeavour it’s when I have to push against some resistance that I usually manage to get somewhere.
What do you photograph when there’s nothing to photograph? Well, maybe a bird’s nest, or a house hidden behind a messy jumble of still barren branches.
There now is a flood of photographs of deserted streets, of people wearing masks, of people posing behind glass. I can’t fault all those photographers for doing what they’re doing; yet I also can’t help but feel they’re not pushing themselves hard enough.
Or maybe I shouldn’t apply the criteria I use for my own work to look at other people’s work.
Those pictures of people behind windows had me think of Shizuka Yokomizo’s work, specifically her portraits of people in their homes. To get those pictures — photographed decades before this pandemic — the artist sent her subjects a letter, in which she outlined her ideas and motivations, combined with instructions:
I would like to take a photograph of you standing in your front room from the street in the evening.
The full text can be found on the artist’s website (scroll down). Much could be written about this work, and plenty already has.
What’s interesting to me is 1. how well the work still holds up and 2. how it introduces an interesting variant into the world of portraiture — more than anywhere else, the idea of a collaboration between subject and photographer applies here.
And it’s going to be this particular work that I’m afraid I’ll be taking as my gold standard when looking at all those pandemic pictures produced today. This doesn’t mean that these kinds of photographs can’t be made today. Still, I believe that it’s a photographer’s duty to be at least mindful of those who came before them.
There was an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books entitled Migrant Mother: Dorothea Lange and the Truth of Photography. In it, Lennard Davis discusses the famous photograph, its making as much as the larger story. The article doesn’t contain anything that wasn’t known before. If you’ve read Anne Whiston Spirn's Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports From the Field (I haven’t) and/or Linda Gordon’s Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (I have), you’ll know the story. If you’re unfamiliar with both books and the story, the article will give you a good summary of various of the issues (and if you’re teaching, it’s a good assigned reading).
I feel like I should be happier than I actually am about the fact that I found a publisher for my first photobook Vaterland. This is the current cover of the book — assuming it won’t get improved in the design process. But this is the time of so much dread that I’ve been barely able to focus on this development. There’s just so much other stuff to worry about. Well, once we’ve all made it out of the state we’re in right now, I’ll tell you more about the book — its making, what it centers on, etc.
I guess for today, I’m just going to leave you with this picture of a tree.
When I was in Japan, I took a number of pictures of trees — there, they’re usually very strictly taken care of, often with all kinds of contraptions restricting their growth. Of late, I started paying attention a lot more to trees, and every once in a while, I’m photographing one. This particular one struck me.
I’d like to think that there’s a metaphor of sorts there, but this is probably going to take it too far. It’s just a picture.
As always, thank you very much for reading! I hope you and your loved ones are safe and well, and I hope it stays that way!
— Jörg
love the images of your walks! They are so soothing and meditative. Can't agree more with the worry of the poisons in our minds, I worry that we are running from one rat race to another, just moving from physical to digital... hope you are safe and well too!
The book cover is great - don't change it!