What can be done?
How there might be a silver lining in the pandemic after all; and how it's up to use to create it
In the life of a creative person, there arrive these moments where something doesn’t work out the way it was supposed to. Crucial grant money might not arrive after all, a trip might get canceled, a job might be lost, a camera or some other important tool might break. No doubt, all of these events are frustrating (to say the least). But they’re also important because they ask for at least a part of one’s endeavours to be re-evaluated. A solution has to be found that, ideally, amounts to more than somehow scraping together the funds to fix the problem.
I have run into all of these problems myself over the course of my life time (in fact, I’m currently facing a rather big one myself, and I currently have no idea how I will be able to solve it). I know all about and have experienced the frustrations. But I also know how many of these problems have forced me to find solutions that ultimately have worked in my favour.
In my teaching I have found that students who struggle the least with impediments usually have the hardest time making a lot of progress. That big next step forward often doesn’t show up because all the little steps are just so easy. The easier things are, the harder it is to overcome one’s own limitations — there’s no struggle, and without a struggle good art usually cannot be made. The inverse isn’t automatically true: if there’s a struggle, there’s no guarantee that there will be a big step forward. But at least there’s the chance for that. Teaching when a students faces an enormous struggle is possibly the most frustrating experience: as a teacher, you must not (and usually cannot) solve someone else’s problems, and you don’t know when the solution might arrive. Usually, you become the sounding board for all the student’s frustrations, and you’re unable to say anything other than: keep trying, it will all work out. And it always will.
About four years ago, after I had decided to very actively pursue my own photography again, I realized that I wasn’t going to make any progress if I simply continued what I was doing. I knew my tools, I knew how to use them, I knew how to make a picture — it was all good, too good. During my first trip to Poland, right after I had decided to make pictures again, I produced something like this:
Whether or not this is a good picture or not is for other people to decide (the colours are slightly wonky because I never finished that part of the processing). I remember how easy it had come to make the picture, and I remember how “satisfied” I was when I saw the scan. But that satisfaction was very short lived: I didn’t want to make the same pictures over and over again. It wasn’t going anywhere. It was too easy. It was, yes, fucking boring.
So I decided to break it all up and do something radically different. I decided I would have to use a digital camera (which would also solve the problem of getting film developed and scanned — honestly, in retrospect I don’t even know how the hell I thought film was better), I would move way from the square, I would move away from shooting with a slight wide-angle lens, and I would work in black and white. I knew nothing about how to do any of that.
I had applied for a grant to buy a camera and received a very minor fraction of the money (I told you I have experience dealing with this kind of stuff). Instead of a brand-new Nikon D810 I ended up buying a used D800 and added a new 50mm lens (thankfully, there is an excellent lens that’s cheap).
Photographically, my next trip to Poland was a disaster (I had decided to blow through all my air miles for these trips). My files looked like shit, and I had no idea how to frame a picture in 4x5 (this is the aspect ratio I had picked). My horizontal pictures were atrocious, but there were some verticals that I liked. In retrospect, my early b/w conversions — I have been using a Photoshop plugin as the basis for my work — looked ridiculous (well, they look ridiculous to me now).
It took me months to figure out how to tweak digital raw files so they don’t look like digital shit, and it took me maybe two years to figure out what I wanted my b/w to look like. Honestly, that process wasn’t fun. Initially, I was incredibly disheartened. But I had set out to do this in part so I would know what my students were dealing with, so it seemed only fair enough to keep going (and to imagine having a teacher who’d tell me to work through it). Also, I don’t easily give up.
Not a single picture from that second trip to Poland even survived the early editing stage when I started working on what was going to become Vaterland, my first photobook. In terms of pictures, I had flown thousands of kilometers for nothing. I remember looking at my pictures after I came back, wondering what the hell I was doing.
It was during my third trip to Poland that I managed to get some pictures that were discoveries for me. I found pictures that I could have never thought of before. Even though they now look a little different than they did when I first processed them, I still like them. This picture didn’t make it into Vaterland, but I remember that making it was a revelation for me:
Whatever you want to say about the picture, it looks radically different than the square picture above, doesn’t it? This picture, much like many others (including most in Vaterland), make me want to escape from the frame. There’s a sense of unease, a sense of anxiety triggered. I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking when I cut off the helicopter’s cockpit, but at that moment, I knew that to cut it off meant to create something entirely different.
I came back with a good number of usable pictures from that trip, some of whom made it all the way into the final edit of Vaterland. When I looked at those pictures after I came back home, I knew I was onto something (even though I also realized it would take a long time to really work it out).
I don’t know whether you like these pictures. It really doesn’t matter, because my point is not to show off what a great photographer I am (I’m clearly not). Instead, I wanted to focus on having to deal with difficulties, with obstacles, during the creative process. I firmly believe that you need these obstacles if you want to push yourself forward into a territory that you might not even have imagined you’d enter.
Given the pandemic, all of us are now being forced into the same situation: we all have these gigantic obstacles placed in front of us. We can’t easily leave the house (we shouldn’t really). When we do, we better gear up (mask and gloves for shopping etc.). And in all likelihood, we cannot pursue the various projects we are in the middle of or that we wanted to pursue. Bummer.
But then, if you think about it, this is a real once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for all of us to experience the very same challenge collectively. If we come out of this pandemic merely continuing what we’ve been doing before, we’d be throwing away a huge opportunity. Whatever the changes might look like at a societal level, it seems clear that anyone engaged in some form of creative endeavour now has to find a solution for whatever problem this pandemic has created.
You cannot continue what you’ve been working on? Well, tough luck! Lighten up, and find something else! Solve the creative problem you are being presented with! Take different pictures, challenge yourself!
Not to call anyone in particular out, but the saddest thing I have seen so far is to witness all those photographers who now dive into their archives to pull out stuff that might be relevant for the pandemic. I mean: come on! What kind of creativity is this? Maybe the worst is to see artists re-branding their well-known older work as somehow suddenly being about the pandemic. (add face-palm emoji here)
Speaking of which — I’m guessing that this is going to be an unpopular take: why does the pandemic mean that pictures have to be made around or about it? There already exist a large variety of pictures of empty streets (try improving Thomas Struth’s…). So why make new ones — to show us what the streets look like when all we have to do to see them is to look out of the window?
In my last email, I discussed an artist photographing people standing in the windows of their homes long before all of this — should there really be more of these kinds of pictures?
Maybe that’s the other baffling aspect of the pandemic to me: why do so many people feel the need to make pictures about something we’re all experiencing right now? What could we possibly learn from that? How could this possibly lighten our spirits?
One of the very positive developments that have sprung up recently is stayathome.photography, a site developed by Berlin based Yana Wernicke and Jonas Feige. On the site, there are now over 200 photographic conversations between photographers paired up by Yana and Jonas. The idea itself isn’t new, but in this context and with these parameters, it has been taken to a new level: you make work at home, reacting to what your partner has produced before. It’s a good challenge, and it contributes to a growing testament of the creative spirit dealing with feeling trapped.
And the large variety of the pictures on the site does not look like the poor visual diet produced by so many news photographers. Instead, there is amazing tenderness in many of them, a recognition that there is a world of visual wonders right in front of our eyes.
Unrelated: I enjoyed reading this article about a set of live recordings by The Velvet Underground very much. I’m with the author: those recordings are great. And I wish I had written that piece. Alas…
When I came up with the idea of this Mailing List, I think I said that there weren’t going to be too many emails. And here I am, writing another one just a few short days after my previous one. So it goes. I’m not going to keep this pace up. But I felt inspired to write the above, and I’ve come to embrace those moments when inspiration strikes, knowing how they’re not as common as I would like them to be.
So I hope you liked the above. As always thank you for reading!
And stay healthy and safe!
— Jörg