The Fall of Language and What It Might Mean
In which I mention a book I'm reading, talk about some upcoming work, and express my amazement about the Trump family's visual illiteracy
I’m often reading more than one book at a time. These days, one of the books is The Fall of Language in the Age of English by Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura (there’s an excerpt here). The book brings together two things that are of interest to me, Japanese culture and the issue of translation.
I am fluent in both German and English, and I’ve written long enough to know that translating between these languages isn’t quite as straightforward as you might imagine. Even though the languages are closely related, they operate very differently. German allows for much more complex grammatical constructs, whereas English is more functional and flexible. German is heavily centered on nouns, whereas in English you can turn anything into a verb. So to go from one to the other requires some rethinking of what is being said.
There was one occasion where I noticed this fact very prominently. A few years ago, I wrote an essay for a photography festival in Germany. Due to the very short deadline, I told them I could only do it in English. No problem, they said, we can have it translated into German (I think there were German and English language versions of the catalog). When I received the (German) catalog in the mail, I giddily looked for my essay, only to be massively confused: it literally took me ten minutes to realize that the text had in fact been based on what I had written. For sure, it didn’t remotely read like anything I would write, and some of what I had tried to say had got completely lost in translation (lesson learned: where/when possible, I’m doing my own translations).
A little after my experience with the catalog I came across a tremendously interesting essay entitled The Murakami Effect, written by Stephen Snyder (you want to read this, it’s well worth your time). The essay’s main idea is expressed by its subtitle: On the Homogenizing Dangers of Easily Translated Literature. I’ll admit that part of the reason why I read the essay was because Haruki Murakami’s writing has long been an annoyance to me. Your mileage might obviously vary, but the style of writing is trying too hard to be cool, female characters are at best mediocre cyphers that usually just serve as sex objects for the male characters, and many of the books are more or less completely identical once you switch out names and minor details. Snyder’s essay had me appreciate Murakami even less for reasons that will be obvious once you read it. As a counter-model, Mizumura was given, and that’s how I came across this particular writer.
I was excited to find that Mizumura had written a book about languages and translation. Born in Japan, Mizumura had lived in the US for quite some time (due to her father’s job). Out of sheer spite, she studied French (but not English) in college, before moving back to Japan to start a career as a Japanese language novelist there (you can find all the details in the introduction of the book). Apparently, The Fall of Language in the Age of English caused a big stir in Japan when it was published.
The larger picture discussed by Mizumura is very interesting to me. It’s one thing to know about complaints regarding English from, say, the French. But it’s an entirely different thing to read about the view from Japan, a country that could have easily become yet another Western colony had it not been for the confluence of smart local choices and lucky historical breaks (Mizumura frames it this way in the book — I don’t know remotely enough about Japanese history to doubt it).
I haven’t started the final part, which deals with Japanese literature itself. But the earlier parts deal with the role of the writer in relation to their native culture and with (roughly speaking) Western colonialism through its languages. This view from the outside has had much to offer to me.
I think as a writer, you want to think of what you’re actually doing. You don’t want to do that all the time (that would be gratuitous at best and self-indulgent at worst). But every once in a while, you want to consider your own role in relation to those whom you intend to write for. And those considerations cannot be fully decoupled from the culture or society you operate in. I believe the same is true for photographers as well.
There also is the fact that photoland is more fragmented than it might seem, especially if you exist in the English-language bubble. I know that many German texts are never translated. The same is true for essays written in French or Polish or Japanese… The list goes on and on. More often than not, essays that aren’t translated aren’t just another take on Robert Frank’s The Americans (obviously, those exist as well). Instead, they present a different way of looking at photographs, a different way of thinking about photography, and very often a look at photographers that simply aren’t covered by English language authors.
There even are cultural differences between how photographers treat writing. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the idea is mostly that photographers don’t have to write because if they wanted to write, they would have become writers (this is obviously mind-numbingly stupid, but it’s an actual argument I’ve heard many times). In contrast, in Japan, many photographers have written or write extensively. For example, in Japan Yurie Nagashima has received prestigious prizes both as a photographer and a writer. But most of the writing by Japanese photographers is only accessible to those who can read the language (learning to read Japanese is a lot more difficult than “merely” learning how to speak the language). There hardly are any translations into other languages.
As a consequence of that, outside of Japan, the richness of thinking around photography in that particular country is mostly unknown. Instead, often borderline cartoonish ideas exist regarding what photography in Japan is. Most people won’t know anyone other than either Nobuyoshi Araki or Daido Moriyama. That really is to bad.
For other countries, the idea of a local photographic culture doesn’t even exist in the English speaking world. An example I’d pick would be Poland — ever since I’ve visited I’ve become aware of the sheer richness of its photographic culture and history, vast parts of which are completely unknown outside of Poland. I’ve only seen small glimpses of it.
So when we talk about translation, we don’t just talk about languages. We talk about access to societies and cultures. The more I learn about languages and translation, the more I realize to what extent I’m missing out as far as the world’s cultural richness is concerned.
As if this weren’t bad enough, these days, we can’t even fully understand “the other side” in our own societies, let alone all those marginalized by the structural racism that we operate in — and this despite the fact that we share a language…
For example, recently the NPPA published a new Photo Bill of Rights, which has caused some apoplectic responses from mostly male white photojournalists: how dare anyone tell them they have to ask for consent when they’re out trying to save the world? (I’m paraphrasing, but not all that much).
Well, how and why this matters was laid out clearly and strongly by Christina Aushana and Tara Pixley in a must-read article entitled Protest Photography Can Be a Powerful Tool For and Against Black Lives Matter. Here’s a key part:
[…] some of photojournalism’s extractive practices: wherein photographers are emboldened by their benevolent intent of social documentation and feel so entitled to the lived experiences of the public as to not bother engaging in conversation with those they photograph.”
Seriously, we got a lot of work to do in photoland. Maybe to those who like me have enjoyed the luxury of not having to deal with all this work it might feel like a lot to think about now (against the background of the pandemic no less). But many other people have not had that luxury. So let’s get to work.
A few years ago, I wrote a piece entitled Annie Leibovitz’s Capitalist Realism. I had always wanted to re-visit the piece to expand it. There just hadn’t been a good reason to do so. But now there is. I was approached to turn the piece into a short book, so this is what I will be spending a large part of the next weeks on.
This is going to be a lot of work, but I’m excited about being able to do it. As much as I like the piece, I wish it had been fleshed out more. It was already so long that I worried people wouldn’t read it for that reason. Turns out a few people recently told me they didn’t read it because they disliked Leibovitz’s work so much.
But the piece got another life, after the recent Simone Biles cover that was widely panned, in part because of the rendering of the athlete’s skin tone by Leibovitz. I personally don’t think Leibovitz can render anyone’s skin tone properly, but obviously, this observation does not in any way make the problem at hand disappear.
I think I will de-focus the piece because Annie Leibovitz is just a symptom of the larger underlying issue: Photography’s Capitalist Realism. I will try to work that out more clearly in the book. We’ll see how it goes.
And then there’s this. Whenever I think I’ve seen it all, there are more insane visuals being produced by the Trump family. Talking about this in a critical way really amounts to little more that shooting fish in a barrel.
Maybe you haven’t heard the back story, but you probably know who this is. In that case, I suspect the picture will strike you as odd, won’t it? And if you’ve heard the story, then it will also strike you as odd, but as different odd (with possibly some overlap).
I think the only thing that still amazes me about this all is how detached these people are from actual reality. Somebody thought this was going to be a good idea.
Somebody (possibly the same person) also thought this was a good idea: to violently attack peaceful protestors in front of the White House, so donald Trump could walk over to a church and hold up a Bible, a book that he very obviously has no relationship with (I read that Ivanka Trump carried it over in her $1,500 purse).
What’s really interesting is that the Trumps clearly know that pictures matter. But at the same time, they’re almost completely visually illiterate, producing the worst possible images. When you think about it, that’s kind of amazing.
Unfortunately, they’re also bringing this approach to dealing with the pandemic, and that’s where thing get a lot more serious. Deadly, in fact. As I’m writing this, more than 130,000 Americans have died, and there’s no end in sight. It’s crazy.
Having said all that, I hope that this email reaches you being safe and well, and I hope it’ll stay that well. Please wear a mask!
As always thank you very much for reading.
— 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.
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I just found your blog through a list of photography blogs on Phlearn. I just spent the last hour reading some of your articles and find them to be quite thought provoking. I am looking forward to more.
As always, I really enjoyed reading your thoughts. Due to my job I am fully aware of all the traps you encounter in translating complex tasks and it was really nice to follow your train of thoughts. I hadn´t heard about this baked bean story but it only strengthens my belief that the Trumps are the modern equivalent to the biblical plagues.