Notes From Nowhere

Well, I feel a little spoiled: I can’t really state that I have suffered a lot for my Mountain Project (just the opposite – nothing keeps life’s dirt at a distance better than to make photographs in a snowstorm at 7.500 feet!). Yet, the project has become sort of popular with, as of today, over 6.000 views over at issuu, given that I have put it there only very recently.

If you have a fairly up to date flash plugin, you can flip through the book above, or click on it and look at the larger version at issuu. This is still an ongoing project and I’ll go back to the Alps later this year. After all, topographically the Italian mountains are not that different from Manhattan – only the food is much better…

I know, I know, the winter is over. But these two snaps from January are growing on me. Or rather, the question grows on me: What do you really miss when you’re out of town? Yesterday at the Met, I payed my respects to the life of the creative, at an event about blogging and fashion. “The Sartorialist” talked about “The Sartorialist”, in a strangely ambivalent mode toward the corporate world, looking animated by his own fashionable post-corporealism, but also looking, and acting, as if he just fell out of some PowerPoint presentation. A grim, and to my mind exceedingly fashion-devoid journalist from the New York Times talked about her busy lifestyle (apparently using a computer for the first time during her presentation – I’m not joking: I can picture her now, yelling at office staff for not uploading her latest insights in time). She seemed oblivious to the fact that the one screen shot on the projector during her speech featured, more than anything, an animated and rather obnoxious before-and-after ad. So much for being a visual type. The whole thing was hosted by Harold Koda for the Met. Koda, awkwardly fumbling along in front of the audience with his jokes about nerdy bloggers having a field day in the sparkling environment of the Met, successfully (oh, the irony!) made his employer look like a dinosaur wearing the wrong shade of lipstick. If anything, the whole event quickly turned into a textbook case of a corporation not getting it.

Diane Pernet (decidedly not an out-of-town character), on the other hand, did not talk much. And when she did, you did not want her to stop. She made my day. Thanks!

Martin Parr was certainly one of the few photographers that brought me to this medium. He actually had something to say, something about the world as it is today. Well, by now I’ve became interested in different subjects, and I am not interested in photographers as role models anymore. But when I ran around Berlin in the late 1990ies, with my old Canon and a ring flash, it seemed impossible to be anything but some kind of visual cynic.

And as it turns out, what Parr had to say in the 80ies and 90ies has become true faster than anyone thought. The world, I think, has been replaced by a photographed world, photographed via the lenses of the digital cameras of tourists. Are there still people, trees, buildings? Is it still possible to take a walk through Central Part and believe that one has taken a walk without it being documented on one’s cell-phone or digicam in the form of an image? Is it still possible to actually live in the world, rather than depict it?

Martin Parr’s prophecies seem all too real. At this point, our lives apparently consist of photographed moments. “Me at the Eiffel Tower.” “Me in Central Park.” “Me at the supermarket.” How much worse can it get? Was Nietzsche still an optimist?