A return

Into the aesthetics of boredom

I was writing to someone I hope to work with, a mentor in photography, and in response to his query as to what we should work on, I wrote the response as copied below. But in doing so, I was called back to this form, the form of the Substack.

What does it mean to write here? What does it mean to to distribute photographs in this space? What does it mean for me to ask you to pause and look? An impossible task I imagine. In an age in which, by some estimates, a staggering 1.8 trillion photographs are taken every year, which equates to 54,000 taken every minute, how can I hope to intervene in your stream? More pressingly, what right do I have to intersperse myself, to, in David Mamet’s words, “insist the position”? Even more pressingly, should you be gazing at one more image, lying in bed before sleep, or killing time until the subway rolls in? Or should you put down the phone instead, delete the app or take a hammer to the screen, and free yourself once and for all from the hegemony of image exchanges like this one you hold in your hand?

Plain and simple, I don’t have the right to introduce yet another image to you, and that is the aporia of contemporary image making, the lacunal eddy in which I—we—are caught, endlessly cast about (cast off) from that which matters, the image itself. To the images themselves I bellow, echoing and twisting Husserl—but what does that mean?

What does it mean to look? What does it mean to see? To see through the vast array of images already tangled in front of us? this is not a criticism of you, but of us? A criticism in search of a conversation, of a dialogue about looking, about seeing in an endleslly distracted age. Perhaps it begins here.

Below is the letter, excerpted for privacy.

As mentioned, up until about 18 months ago. I was a professor of philosophy, but Covid really took the joy out of teaching for me—there was something about those two years of remote learning and masked interactions that just made it all really rote. When my contract at a local art college expired, I only half tried to hold in to it until deciding my heart wasn’t in it anymore. I love teaching and communicating difficult subjects, but felt that the corporate academic model that has become standard in this country left little room for that.

Prior to completing my PhD in philosophy in Switzerland, I was an artist in New York doing installation based performances. Prior even to that I did a degree in photography at the San Francisco Art Institute and worked for a time as a photojournalist in Eastern Europe, primarily in Romania and Poland. My father was a journalist—print but he even did his own photographs in Vietnam—and there was something in what I was doing that was copying him. In the end it didn’t feel right, and after witnessing the coup against Gorbachev, I put away my cameras and left that life behind. I didn’t want to make my living based on other people’s trauma, and I knew, as a commercial photojournalist I’d always be looking for that photograph of the dead child and mourning mother that we’ve seen so often. I mean no disrespect to your colleagues who risk their lives to document that suffering—only that it wasn’t for me.

But the love of photography and image making never left me and I’ve struggled with not “being” a photographer in the years since. This is why I reached out for a mentorship—I’m trying to figure out what it means to be a photographer, to be an artist at age 54 with no body of work, no coming-up in the world of photography behind me. Of course, it could be asked if it isn’t enough just to take pictures, to be engaged in image making. I ask myself this. But always I want more; I want my images to communicate, and for this I need an audience.

I also have strong notions of living in a moment of what I call the “great unwinding” in which society—the liberal values we embraced and believed in—are disappearing. I write from America of course, but having been raised in Europe, I see it all too clearly there as well. From Ukraine to Brexit, from Hungary to Italy, the great unwinding is at work. And in its wake a certain meaninglessness takes root, a Neitzschean nihilism, though Nietzschean contours seem too poetical for what we face. Instead a slowly unfolding cataclysm, both terrifying and boring at the same time. A standing by at the end of time.

And what does this have to do with photography or this project of mentoring that we begin? This intimacy of alienation is in the photographs I take, or at least it is in me as I take them—whether it is carried in the actual images we can discuss. But for me the project of photography is everything—it’s a touching in, both a compassionate gaze, a hand on one’s shoulder, and a furious staring at the wreckage left behind at the end.