Words Without Pictures (Because Some Pictures Should Not Be Online)
In which I send an email without any pictures and hope that I can get away with it
These emails still are an experiment for me. I’m experimenting with what I can write, how I can write it, what to give away and what to conceal… I don’t know to what extent my enjoyment over the process translates — I hope that it does at least a little bit.
At the same time, I also know that these emails are operating in the larger attention economy, an economy that I have been reluctant to be too much a part of. Naive me thinks that what’s worthwhile reading will make its way to its audience, when in reality efforts have to be made to get said audience’s attention. These emails are an attempt to do just that, while also having something a little bit more personal.
But the attention economy also demands for things to be flashy and attractive; and here opinons will start to differ. I am a visual person, yet at the same time, my favourite publication is The New York Review of Books, which is very text heavy and provides only the barest minimum of magery.
At some stage while writing this email, I realized that I had no photographs that would go with it. Should that even be an option — to send out an email without any pictures? But then, maybe that can be an option occasionally. So I made it my option here. Things will make more sense further down (trust me on that one, please).
Over the past few years, part of my work has been to figure out to what extent my own personal background can — or maybe should — enter my work as a critic. My background has me hesitant to become too personal: I grew up in northern Germany where people in general don’t talk all that much, and there is a reluctance to overemphasize the individual (to what extent this has changed in the decades since I left I wouldn’t know). So I have always been a bit weary of all those personal photography projects where someone needs to spill out all their drama — it’s not that I don’t care (I mostly do); it’s just that we all have our respective dramas, and the incessant observations of one’s own navel — which now has 30 year olds write their biographies — strikes me as self-indulgent.
But criticism cannot function unless it is aware of its own fallacies. Someone like Robert Hughes might not have subscribed to this approach to criticism. But I’m not writing for Robert Hughes types, I’m writing criticism with someone in mind for whom criticism provides an opportunity to challenge what they believe in, instead of confirming it in bouts of pomposity (having dissed Hughes that much I will have to admit that I do enjoy some of his writing quite a bit, given its insights).
In fact, I had just been invited to write something about photography criticism by the makers of the new Over journal. I used the opportunity to re-read James Elkins’ What Happened to Art Criticism?, a slim book filled to the brim with wit and insight. I had read it years ago. Given I was unable to locate my copy, I had to re-order it first (contrary to what usually happens, my first copy did not magically re-appear a minute after I hit the “order” button). Elkins concerns himself with art — and not photography. Or rather, photography simply doesn’t make an appearance, which is in part understandable because some of the types of criticism Elkins identifies don’t even exist in photography (not every rabbit hole needs to be explored, so I’ll spare you the details).
Having re-read the book, I started wondering why the hell I had agreed to writing the piece in the first place — it had all been so obvious, yet now it was just too obvious what I was going to write. Or was it? Long story short, this is one of the ways in which especially writing commissions unfold, and the end result always ends up being a lot more interesting than what I had originally envisioned. So the criticism piece did center on the role of the critic — or rather what I believe her or his role ought to be, and it then went into why I think criticism should exist at all.
Last year, I briefly discussed the piece I had written about Masahisa Fukase’s family work with someone living in Tokyo. I remember that I was excited about the fractured structure of the piece, which I felt (and still feel) enabled me to do some things that I hadn’t been able to do before. I had started out with
I can’t look at 家族 (kazoku – family) without my ideas of family in mind, in particular my tortured relationship to some of its members. To pretend that I could look at these photographs of a father-son relationship without any of that weight would be a travesty.
I thought that this disclaimer would be enough. After all, I was going to write about Fukase. In addition, I did enjoy leaving pretty much everything from my own background open to, well, interpretation or imagination. But no, my interlocutor told me that she had expected to read a lot more about me and my own father (ugh!), and she was disappointed not to find any of that in the piece (for background, she grew up in the US to an English father and a Japanese mother, speaking both English and Japanese fluently).
That had me thinking, in part because I wondered what happened if I did indeed expand my own role in the piece. For sure, I didn’t and don’t want to fully expand on my relationship with my own father — the thought of adding another biographical piece to the millions already out there gives me the shivers. Still, I wondered to what extent I could push the idea without producing yet another piece of tiresome confessional writing.
And so I set my mind to it, editing and expanding the Fukase piece into something that now covers a variety of photographers (including Richard Billigham and Larry Sultan) dealing with their fathers. At this time, I’m thinking the end result should live in the form of a book; given my luck finding a publisher for my first photobook, I don’t expect it to be published, though.
So there is that growing seed of biography in my criticism, and I had to come back to it again in the beginning paragraphs of the piece I wrote about the Masculinities exhibition/book. There was something that I had to get out of my system (I doubt that anyone who knows me well will be surprised by what I wrote):
I have never identified with many strands of the masculinity that would be associated with me, that, in fact, I was told was mine (I’m a heterosexual white man, now in his early 50s). I find its aggressive competitiveness unpleasant and unnecessary; I find its posturing of strength and dominance ludicrous and wasteful; I find most of its bonding rituals annoying and ridiculous.
The piece wouldn’t have made sense without this introduction — it informs where I’m coming from as a critic (it might also provide some context for a piece I wrote almost two years ago about photoland’s macho cult). That aside, it felt good to bring this out into the open.
While thinking about this email, I also considered showing and writing about the for me most meaningful picture last year. I took it during my trip to Tokyo in late October 2019.
Its background is simple, even though it’s not something that I have talked about before. Much like many other people, I have a long history of suffering from depression. There’s no need to go into unnecessary details, but episodes come and go, and at times, they’re triggered by being in specific locations — very large cities such as New York City or Tokyo will do.
This particular trip, I had arrived a few days before the work that was scheduled there. Much to my surprise, jet lag wasn’t much a problem this time (if there’s one thing I’ve learned about jet lag is that it’s completely unpredictable). I was staying in a nice enough hotel in a good location, right at a bustling traffic hub with lots of places to eat. I couldn’t say what it was, but for a day or two I ended up being crippled by depression, sitting in my hotel room and staring at the walls instead of going out to take some pictures as I had planned.
One thing I had been trying to do for a while now was to take a picture of myself with my phone. I wouldn’t want to call it a selfie, because my idea had been to try to photograph myself as if I were someone else, a photographer in the room with depressed me. As you might be able to imagine that’s not a very easy task at all, and I had failed many times. To begin with, I wouldn’t use the front-facing camera of my iPhone — I wanted a better picture. So I’d have to point the phone at me and take a picture without seeing what was on the screen, all the while trying not to break out of the state I was in (if this sounds tortured to you, you don’t even know the half of it). All previous attempts had ended in photographic failure (the pictures didn’t look real to me in the maybe 10% of cases where they even were framed properly), while, however, pushing me out of my depressed state. So there was always that.
In Tokyo, though, I got my picture. It was exhilerating as much as it was shocking — it took me a few days to come to grips with it. Right at that moment, I “merely” was jolted out of my sorry state. I don’t remember what I did, possibly take a sip of water, maybe even go out to look at the neighbourhood. Only later did I spend time with the picture.
In an obvious way, photographs cannot show mental states. Photographs show surfaces. But for me, this particular photograph does show my mental state, and I’m convinced that someone else might pick up on it as well. To begin with, I look my age (which in photographs I tend not to do). I also resemble my father in many ways, a fact that I find very unpleasant and unsettling. And I look completely drained of life — I look like I feel in these kinds of moments.
It’s not that I don’t want to show the photograph. However, it means too much to me to risk having it circulate somewhere on the internet. This is not to say that I don’t trust you, my readers. But there’s an archive of these emails on Substack, and who knows what bots will be “looking” at and collecting the photographs. In other words, for this particular photograph I want to retain as much control as possible. It’s thus unlikely that it will get seen (I’m not going to produce a project about my struggles with depression; and I can’t think of a different context in which it might fit).
The idea of wanting so much control over images online might strike you as strange — after all, don’t we give up that control happily (especially when we deal with the data krakens Google and/or Facebook)? But I remember how the year before my last trip to Tokyo, in that city a photographer spoke of her old work, large parts of which she had tried very hard to keep from the internet. Her reason was simple, and it made immediate sense to me: she had a son, and she didn’t want her son to come across those photographs before he’d have the mental maturity to understand their ideas and background. My situation is different. Still, I don’t want that picture to slip out of my control (maybe this is why Roland Barthes did not include the picture of his mother in Camera Lucida).
So that’s my email without any pictures. The next one will be different again (there will be pictures).
As always thank you for reading!
— Jörg