Two weeks later
In which I talk about 1,000 words, how to talk about one's art, two books I found by chance, and some techno
These past two weeks, as nothing actually happened, time appears to somehow have accelerated. Or maybe it’s the effect of November, one of my least favourite months of the year (the other two are January and February). The sky’s perpetually grey, it’s getting cold, the animals I’ve been feeding out back have disappeared.
At least I have some hope, namely that the general unpleasantness of 2020 will prevent people from compiling the “best of” lists that tend to take up all of December (naive me!).
Meanwhile, the number of Japanese words in the app that I use to cram vocabulary has now exceeded 1,000. Somehow, this feels like a massive achievement, even as my attempts to actually something inevitably end up being pretty pathetic. If anything, for someone as impatient as I am, learning a new language holds that daily lesson that things will often build up or improve through tedious and slow accumulation.
I have re-started work on a longer essay based on a photobook review I published a while back. Unlike the Leibovitz review that ended up as Photography’s Neoliberal Realism, this essay is going to be heavily fragmented, and it’s going to be a lot more personal.
I’m excited about the work as much as I’m dreading it. Writing doesn’t always come easy, and in light of the many first-personal confessional books already being made, of course I’m asking myself whether we need another one. Probably not. So it can’t be too confessional for that reason alone.
This time, I don’t have a publisher lined up already (Michael Mack had approached me to ask whether I’d be willing to expand my review into a longer essay for his DISCOURSE book series). The lack of a deadline and thus of external pressure are making the job harder.
Many artists are not very good at talking about their work. Many artists, especially photographers, are not very good at diving into the often contested, where not outright very problematic history of their medium.
A very good example of how to do it right is provided by this artist talk by Anna Ehrenstein, a rising star in Germany’s contemporary-photography scene. Honestly, watch it, and steal all of her tricks: be informed, be aware of all the implications and pitfalls of your work, and speak clearly about it.
Sarah Sentilles’ Draw Your Weapons was an unexpected surprise find on Twitter, where I found it mentioned in some comment (can’t remember by whom). I often look up suggestions and/or references, because I’ve learned that there is so much that I otherwise miss, regardless of how much attention I pay.
I’ve been massively enjoying the book, which pulls together a large variety of ideas and notions, including what we believe photographs do. Given its author’s lightness of touch (which, to be honest, I envy) I think this book has the potential to make people think about or look at photography in ways that they haven’t considered.
You can read the first chapter on the publisher’s website — you might as well do that before ordering yourself a copy.
Hiroko Oyamada’s The Factory was another surprise find. The book centres on the work life of a group of employees of some unnamed factory that is so large that it’s its own city. The employees are only indirectly named, and it’s not always obvious where one’s narration ends and another one’s begins. But that’s exactly how Oyamada conveys the sheer tedium and pointlessness of work at the factory and, by extension, in most jobs these days.
For example, one of the workers gets hired out of academia for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, and he gets so few instructions concerning what his expected of him that he ends up in a strange limbo. Another is “just” a temp worker, who then finds that the distinction between different types of workers doesn’t mean anything.
It’s a distressing and unsettling read. But with its focus on a universal topic in a Japanese setting it’s a book very much worth your time. Oh, and it’s also one of the many incredible women writers coming out of Japan these days.
Oh, btw, I found that there’s a pdf of Siegfried Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament online. If you’ve never read his essay on photography, you really should (it starts on page 47). For me, this essay is more interesting than Walter Benjamin’s Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Whatever ideas you might have of techno, they’re most likely to be if not outright wrong then too simplistic. Take Efdemin’s New Atlantis. Throughout the album, there is so much airiness that one almost forgets that it’s techno (when you listen on Bandcamp, skip the first track — you can come to it later, but it’s too deceiving for a first impression). It’s sheer beauty.
I wish I had remembered this album a little earlier this year (it came out in 2019) — this is the music that would have made 2020 a little bit more bearable.
What do you know: I looked up the date of my previous email, and it was exactly two weeks ago. Somehow, it felt as if a lot more time had passed.
Regardless, I hope these missives find you well, and I hope that you’re staying safe and well.
As always thank you 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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