Category: NFN

“I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too!”

Sometime last November, I took the subway to Brooklyn and showed Stephen Mayes, the Director of VII Photo Agency, an advanced edit for my upcoming book. Stephen is one of the very few people I ever discuss unfinished personal work with. He flipped through the images on my iPod touch, while I had a very nice, well done cheeseburger – my favorite American food. Soon after I got back to Manhattan, I received an email from him with the offer to write an introduction for my book. If I remember correctly, I thought something along the lines of “yikes”…

The book, “Color White Gray Other,” is out now. You can flip through an online version of all 168 pages (here). It includes Stephen’s essay: “I Am What I See” (just click on the book symbol, above, or follow this link, and you’ll get a very nice full screen view that you can further zoom into). To me, the essay is a little frightening, because it cuts right through any defense systems I thought I had installed so carefully. Well, so be it. When asked, Stephen insisted that what he wrote is purely based on looking at the images, not on any conversation we had over cheeseburgers. I think that even if you are not at all interested in photography at all, let alone my photography, the essay is still a great read.

That being said, I certainly don’t mind if you flip through the rest of the book and look at the images too… If you like what you see, you can get yourself the printed book online (here).

(The eagle-eyed amongst you will notice: Quotes from the following exchange have made it into my new book, Color White Gray Other, which I sent to the printer this past Monday and which you can already preview here; more on that next week. Dr. Hare’s message reached me just hours before the deadline – perfect timing for me.)

“Dear Dr. Hare,

you were right, of course. It was good to speak in person last last week.

I am in a dilemma now. I’ve grown up with an energetic dislike of everything that’s not done well, a joyful disgust at platitudes, intellectual laziness, lack of rigor. And since this is how the world quite generally presents itself (banal, stupid, uninformed-and-not-minding-it), I’ve been happily assuming an ‘anti-world’ stance. You know that I am the last person to quote German philosophers. But I’ve always shared Hegel’s response to the truth that the world isn’t as he thinks it ought to be: so much the worse for the world!

And now I realize, this is just so Continental, and so socially impossible here. I see myself through your eyes, American eyes, and I worry that I look like someone I totally am not! I actually love simple things, and in particular, I love normal people (witness my sense that I’m only really at home in the mountains). And I’m far from any bourgeois pretensions at education (I was never the one to shine in Latin, or to even try to shine!). But I feel as if the edge of my creativity is ironed out of me in this culture of acceptance and positivity. Everything you said was so professionally positive, if you’ll allow this phrase – and please do not take offense.

Now I don’t know whether I should come to see you more often, to have it once and for all ironed out of me, so that I can move on, or whether the distance of written communication is better for preserving my sense of self.

Jens”

“Dear Jens,

I am torn, for of course, I genuinely am part of this culture. But, and that may even be part of the same cultural heritage, I am not one to give up. It strikes me that you are aiming for something that’s almost impossible: to grow sufficiently into a new culture in order to be able to feel at home, and to still look at it from a distance. The constant shift between the inside and outside perspective, I think, may be unbearable. But if that is what you need in order to be creative, I am certainly not going to ignore it. However, your letter leads me to formulate, perhaps for the first time, very clearly what I consider a goal of our conversations. You must learn to leave behind the idea that the world should be better than it is.

I’ll have to give this more thought, and so do you.

Sincerely, Dr Hare”

I can think of a number of ways a business trip can go wrong. This one, however, includes the occurrence of two meta-obstacles:

“Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city. He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki…”

Read the whole story here.