What Is There to Do (2)
In which I try to think more about what it means to be an artist in this particular moment in time; also: writing as thinking out loud
Consider these following two articles that I came across online recently:
and
Here are Ai Weiwei’s thoughts (from the article):
‘The Covid-19 pandemic is a humanitarian crisis. It challenges our understanding of the 21st century and warns of dangers ahead. It requires each individual to act, both alone and collectively.’
And here is a snippet from the article about the Parr masks:
‘Proceeds from sales of the mask go the Martin Parr Foundation, a charity that was created in order to “preserve the archive and legacy of Martin Parr, one of the most significant documentary photographers of post-war Britain.”’
You see where I’m going with this?
I’m all for the principle of supporting charities. But at this moment in time, with a global pandemic raging (not to mention the civil unrest in the US), there are some charities that might need money a bit more urgently than the Martin Parr Foundation. At the time of this writing, Britain has the second highest Covid-19 death toll in the world (in total numbers), leaving it with an atrociously high per-capita death toll (surpassing both Italy and Spain, and six times the number recorded in Germany). The NHS for sure might be happy to get a little extra money.
Based on the reactions I’ve seen online, it is exactly this that has so many people angry about the Parr face masks. And let’s not even consider whether something like this is what the original founders of Magnum Photos had in mind when they set up the agency. Hard to imagine Cartier-Bresson face masks, isn’t it?
The preceding ties in what I have been trying to grapple with for a while now (you’ve seen it in previous emails). These are trying times. As human beings, we are forced to deal with huge uncertainty. We might catch an illness for which there is no cure (yet), and which might kill us. We might lose our jobs, struggling to make ends meet. If you live in the US, we have to deal with civil unrest and its root causes: systemic racism, police violence. If you don’t live in the US, it’s very likely there is the same racism, albeit in a different disguises, at play (just think about all those European countries refusing to accept refugees and migrants).
I don’t know how to deal with all of this personally. But I know that I cannot not deal with it. For example, I cannot not deal with the potential of me catching a life-threatening illness.
I’m also a writer and photographer, and I have been asking myself whether I need to deal with things in that capacity. I don’t want to say that the personal and the artistic are necessarily separate entities. Every creative person will have to find their own balance.
Photoland has been pretty good at expressing concern about some of the pressing issues we’ve been facing (before all of this erupted). But for most members of photoland, that concern was not connected to personal experience. This is one of the privileges enjoyed in photoland: some people might live in a war-torn country, some people might struggle with the lack of civil rights afforded to them, but most members don’t.
To be honest, I’ve always felt uncomfortable about that divide and the way it was handled. All too often, I’ve felt bad about the lip service paid. The privilege of not personally having to deal with some topic while photographing it too often has been ignored.
Now that privilege is gone. Our collective crisis has arrived. We have to find ways to deal with it on a personal level and on an artistic one, and, again, these two don’t necessarily have to be connected (even though they might be).
Actually, the first time I experienced something like this was a few years ago. Roughly one million refugees and migrants, most of them from war-torn countries, came to Germany. Honestly, that was the first time that I thought I should live in Germany because I felt that’s where I needed to be. But I wasn’t in Germany, so all I could do was watch. After the initial wave of goodwill, the counter-movement started. Then the first elections resulted in neo-fascists and neo-Nazis (in the form of the AfD party) gaining seats in state parliaments. In 2017, the AfD got almost 13% of the votes in the national election. Due to the government’s “grand coalition” arrangement it became the largest opposition party in Germany’s Bundestag.
That hit me really hard on a personal level: there are neo-Nazis in the Reichstag again — fuck! That’s not the Germany I want! That’s not my country!
I had begun photographing what I thought would be a project about national and European identity, using Poland and Germany as two examples (working title at the time: Mitteleuropa — inspired by William Vollmann’s Europe Central). Without noticing it at first, I focused more and more on the German part and in particular on things that spoke of its past and its ongoing reckoning with it. This then became Vaterland.
Getting this book together meant adopting a certain focus that ignored some of the pressing contemporary issues. I was going to continue work on the next project (working title: Nationalgalerie) this Spring, but it wasn’t going to be, given the pandemic. I will continue once I can go again.
Before working on Vaterland, I had always thought of myself as a very political person. But I never worked on overtly political subject matters in either my writing or photography. I can’t say that at some stage I made the decision to make political work. I can’t say I sat down with a glass of wine, thought about it, and plotted it all out. (When artists tell you such stories, your bullshit meter might go off.) But once I realized where I was going with the work, I embraced it, and I tried to bring it all together. That entailed neglecting a lot of pictures from Poland that I liked but that just didn’t fit (like the one above — one of the few horizontal pictures I made).
It also entailed looking out for certain pictures. For example, I wanted a picture of a brick wall that had been fixed after war damage. I got it in Hamburg, where I went looking for it in sweltering heat after I had been given the opportunity to be there for a few days. This picture is in Vaterland, but it’s one of the quiet in-between pictures that make more sense in a book sequence than on their own. So you might wonder: this is what you were looking for? Yes, this is one of the pictures I needed.
I’m writing about this not because I want to convince you that Vaterland is the greatest work. The reason why I’m writing about this is because once there were neo-fascists and neo-Nazis in the Bundestag, I simply couldn’t make pictures without addressing the deep sense of shame and guilt and anger I have been feeling ever since.
It’s nothing I would have ever imagined doing when I started taking pictures.
So here we are now, and we’ve all been thrown into the situation where we have to deal with all of these pressing issues: the pandemic, race relations, police violence, and oh, there still are refugees and migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, and there still is #MeToo.
Consequently, it just doesn’t feel right to me for members of photoland to merely express their concern. I think that luxury position is gone. Remember, we collectively don’t have the luxury to simply ignore Covid-19 (well, we can, but that can get us killed). And African Americans don’t have the luxury to simply ignore the systemic racism that is costing so many of them their lives. (These two aren’t related as topics — even though there actually is an overlap, given that the Covid-19 death toll for African Americans is a lot higher than for white people).
Like I said above, there’s the personal level and there’s the artistic one. Artistically speaking, I’ve seen a lot of people spring into action: artists and photographers who have been working on related issues for a while or whose practice made it obvious to fly to Minneapolis, say, to make pictures of protests.
John Edwin Mason wrote a wonderful article about some of the protest pictures. If you haven’t read it yet, do yourself a favour and spend the time with it.
A lot of artists seem to be struggling, though. I’m not talking about money, I’m not talking about how to stay safe and well. I’m talking about whether or how to react artistically to the multiple crises they’re witnessing in their midst. There have been many print sales to support health or civil-rights organizations, but there also has been the mask sale to benefit the Martin Parr Foundation.
And there has been quite a bit more incredibly tone-deaf stuff online coming out of the art and photo world, resulting in outcomes like the above.
Many artists tend to be very sensitive when it comes to someone demanding things from them. This is part of their luxury position, part of their privilege: they can do whatever they want, because it’s art. And art speaks of something bigger.
I’m all for that, I’m all for art’s freedom. But I do think that to insist on that freedom no matter what is happening around you is a cop out and potentially an artistic failure at the same time.
Even as art speaks of something bigger, it’s not metaphysics or some very abstract form of philosophy. Good art has the potential to speak to people. It reflects back to people, even if it is made in the solitude of one’s mind and studio. In these very trying times, to insist on art’s solipsism feels wrong to me.
If you want to think of art as a form of speech (popular approach in the US where you can try to shut down a discussion by invoking your First Amendment free-speech right, which indirectly accuses someone else of censorship), whatever it is that you speak of — that is telling. And if you decide to remain silent, that’s a form of speech, too, and it also is telling.
To insist on the absolute autonomy of art in a time when there are so many crises right outside of one’s home — that feels very wrong and, frankly, a bit deluded to me.
So, artists and photographers, take this time as an artistic challenge as much as a challenge of you as a member of a society in desperate need of hearing your voices!
You know, a lot of what I’m writing about in these emails also is a thinking out loud. It’s a lot closer to the more loose structure and content of the earlier form of my blog. As much as I enjoy being able to write the more formal material on CPhMag.com, writing as thinking out loud helps me understand the world. The hope always is that the end result is of at least some value for you, the reader.
Inevitably, there will be the occasional typo that slips by even after me having read the piece a number of times. Believe me, this bugs me a lot more than it might bother you.
I’m grateful for the encouragement I have received so far after publishing these missives.
Every time I wrote something to the effect of “but next time I’ll get back to something more regular after this terrible stuff just happened” something else, even more terrible came up. So I’m going to keep my mouth shut this time.
One final thing, I set up a little tip jar. I’m feeling incredibly self-conscious about even mentioning this — I hope you don’t mind.
As always thank you for reading, and stay safe and well!
— 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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