Michael Schmidt's Ein-Heit

“Unity, justice, and freedom for the German fatherland. Let us all strive for this, brotherly, with heart and soul. Unity, justice, and freedom are the pillars of this bliss. Flourish in the splendor of this bliss, flourish, German fatherland.”

-Google translation of a plaque depticted in the book Ein-Heit

Please excuse the weird moire pattern in this photo. Pretty, but not real.

I feel compelled to talk about reading the photobook Ein-Heit (Scalo, 1996) in this blog post. I will surely fail. Except I won’t. Because despite the fact that I don’t recognize many people and things in this book, despite the fact that I’m not German, or perhaps even more importantly not a Berliner, and I don’t know the references, and I don’t know the language, I still don’t believe Mr. Schmidt created this book with the idea that any serious attempt at reading it would lead to failure, whatever the outcome.

And yet, Ein-Heit is so weighty in subject matter, so large, so obviously complex, and so laden with meanings that failure always feels like a distinct possibility when I pick up this book. However, my experience with it has always been exceedingly gratifying, no matter how impenetrable the mystery of it sometimes feels.

But it’s not impenetrable. All you have to do is turn the pages.

A photo of Michael Schmidt included in Ein-Heit.

The German word einheit means unity. But with the added hyphen, it reads to me more like one-ness. This is one of the richest book titles I know of, which is why I can’t abide the English version of the book, which has been retitled Un-i-ty. The whole point of the title in German is the subject matter of the book, which is the reunification of the two Germanys in 1990: the DDR (or East Germany, as we used to say), and the BDG (or West Germany). There were two Germanys—hence the two word parts joined by a hyphen—not three, as implied by Un-i-ty. (I hope Herr Schmidt didn’t pick the English title.)

Ein-Heit the book feels epic. Not in the literal sense of the traditional epic form of poetry, which is a long narrative. There is no narrative here (thank God). But the book feels epic in scope, and in length, and in importance.

First photograph in Ein-Heit.

It starts off with three photos pretty clearly taken by Mr. Schmidt—many of the subsequent photos were not originally taken by him, but were photographs he photographed from what appears to be newspapers, magazines, and books, as indicated by the Ben Day dots. The first is a winter scene outside what appears to be an apartment complex. The second photo is of patterned window curtains. The third features patterned wallpaper and part of a table. So far, we’re not being “told” what we’ll find in the rest of the book.

The fourth photograph in Ein-Heit.

The fourth picture is an extremely tight enlargement of a photo of what looks to me like the schematic of a concentration camp. I may have read somewhere that it is. Or perhaps the curator Thomas Weski told us that in a talk in the Hartford program. I don’t believe Mr. Schmidt talked about this photo when my cohort met with him. The fifth photo is an enlargement from a printed document of a man in a suit and hat, looking vaguely official and sinister. Now the reader is being somewhat alerted to what’s coming. The sixth photo is a detail from an embroidery depicting a lute player and another man doffing his hat, both in “period” clothing—the period being vaguely 17th to 19th century to my untutored eyes. It is clearly an image of nostalgia related to a happier, carefree time. (Always dangerous.)

The fifth photograph in Ein-Heit.

The seventh image is an appropriated photo of capped and uniformed soldiers standing at review, possibly Soviet-era DDR military, maybe BDG, but not overtly Nazis. That will come later. The book will continue to rhythmically show us historical images from different eras and Mr. Schmidt’s own photographs of buildings and portraits of more contemporary people, some looking official, some looking like civilians, including punkish youth. We are left to decide in each case which side of the German divide they represent, who or what they might be, and from what time period.

The seventh photograph in Ein-Heit.

Do you see what a failure it is to try to describe this book to you? But that’s OK, it’s all in the hope that you’ve either seen the book and will remember it, or you will soon see it. The book runs 314 pages, with most photographs on the right-hand page. Every time I pick up Ein-Heit, I watch myself turn from the first page to the last without stopping. It is, for me, that compelling.

Why? Why is this such a great book, in my estimation? First, because I’ve never experienced anything like it. Burning curiosity and uncertainty seem to merge with emotional responses to nearly every photograph. It’s as if Mr. Schmidt is plunging us into a mystery that is our mystery, whether we’re German or not. After all, the division and then the reuniting of Germany has had a deep impact on all our lives. Secondly, and I think this is crucial, I never feel the book is propagandistic or polemical. He’s not judging, he’s presenting. I cannot tell you from looking at the book how Mr. Schmidt feels about reunification, except that it’s big and important and historical.

I happen to be re-reading, for one of my own works, the slim little book War and the Iliad, which contains two main essays: one by Simone Weil, called “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” (1939) and the other by Rachel Bespaloff, called “On the Iliad” (between 1939 and 1942). Both women were Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Germany, and Ms. Bespaloff’s essay is a response to Ms Weil’s essay. Ms. Bespaloff is comparing Homer and Tolstoy in her essay when she comments on the nature of the epic:

The style of the epic, when it attains the grandeur it has in Homer and Tolstoy, demands an accurate perception of true facts as well as the inclusiveness of an all-embracing view; it has no place for the arbitrary. It must give the sense of slowness and at the same time have the gift of brevity; it must have insights into collective states of mind and also into individual souls; it must capture the cosmic vision and be captivated by the anthropomorphic imagination; any partiality of judgment or sensibility is therefore impossible to it.

I had been wanting to write about the range of Mr. Schmidt’s photobooks, but reading this passage made me decide I had to write about just Ein-Heit alone, immediately. This passage describes part of why I’ve been so compelled by Ein-Heit for the 13 years I’ve owned a copy. It has grandeur. It has an all-embracing view of the breaking and rejoining of Germany and its shared history. It certainly has slowness, and yet enough brevity that, even at 314 pages, I always turn my way completely through it. And as I said, it’s not judging, it’s giving us an experience that is dark and sinister at times, but it’s an equal-opportunity darkness.

Meanwhile the portraits by Mr. Schmidt are profoundly compassionate and matter of fact and inclusive, although his sympathies clearly lie with the young Germans.

Most of all, I feel from this book a depiction of humanity, much as I do from Homer’s Iliad, with all the tragedy and some of the light which humanity entails. Images of power, force, youth, violence, love, betrayal, horror, and the drudgery of life are amassed and presented as a shared heritage of the German people who, at that time, were coming together again like a long-divorced couple hesitantly trying to give it one more go. People with no real idea what they were getting themselves into, and perhaps no clear memory of what had happened before. It seems that Mr. Schmidt was trying to remind them and keep them honest.

It’s possible to say that this is a depiction of the German soul, but somehow that doesn’t feel sufficient. It’s too easy a summation. It’s reductive, and this book is anything but reductive. The book is more like a step-by-step reconstitution of a memory, one that impresses, as happens in the Iliad, the actual feelings, the experiences, which constitute this memory. Each image closes a circuit in the brain and restores the force of each memory as an actual neural event, which is something words have a hard time doing. Because we can chose to hear or process words—or not. But an image cannot be evaded the same way. The retina sends the message immediately and directly to the brain.

The photographs don’t just reactivate memories, they also create images in the present moment, especially with the faces of people who are living this reunification at the time the images were made. Even though the Iliad was presenting events that happened in 1200 BC and was recorded in the poem around 800 BC, when Homer describes a lance penetrating near a soldier’s belly button and coming out the other side with bits of soldier attached, we viscerally experience that image in the immediate now. So, too, with the images in Ein-Heit. We experience them in the present, whether it’s a schematic of a gas chamber or the portrait of a young Berliner, even if we weren’t alive when the images were made.

Perhaps this is a large part of the power of Ein-Heit—that it is always the present. Distance of time, and even of place, have been erased. Even reading it again and again, I can’t remember what comes next when I turn the page. The force of its non-narrative structure helps assure, for me, its inexhaustible nature. So, too, the uncomfortable beauty of Mr. Schmidt’s photographs. Who can say if, fifty years from now, when everything in it will have been from so long ago, that this will still hold true for new viewers of the book. It’s impossible to know. I won’t be alive to see so you’ll have to tell me.

For insights into the artist, I highly recommend you read Jörg Colberg’s excellent blog post about Mr. Schmidt: https://cphmag.com/michael-schmidt















What Photobooks Can Be: Ron Jude

No blog post about what photobooks can be is possible. So I’ve decided to break up this topic by individual photographers and see what happens. The subject interests me personally, since I conceive of my work first for the book. But over the last 15 years, with the oceanic surge in photobooks, I cannot think about the whole thing. But I can think about bits and pieces.

Miwa at Dashwood Books, a great place to make sense of the torrent of photobooks.

Perhaps you feel as overwhelmed as I do with the uncountable number of new photobooks each year. Perhaps you’ve made a photobook or want to. Or maybe you’re building a library of such books to learn how to photograph. Perhaps, in these cases, this one-sided discussion will be useful to you.

Another one of the best places to find recent photobooks is Bildband Berlin. Ask Joe for help.

Out of compassion for my children I am slowly reducing my library. But one of the things I will leave for them to deal with are the books of Ron Jude. [A note about names in this blog: if I know someone, I’ll use their first name. If not, I’ll use their last name with a prefix like Mr., Ms, or Mx.]

Ron Jude teaches in the University of Oregon undergrad and MFA photography programs.

As the first cohort of the Hartford photo MFA, we defended our theses—our photobook dummies—before Mark Steinmetz and Ron Jude. This is the year I first discovered Ron’s work. Since then I’ve acquired nearly every one of his books, and what has always fascinated and inspired me is just how different each book is.

These range from a small collection of essays and interviews to a slightly larger box with a pamphlet in it to full-on hardcover books published by Mack. Out of almost a dozen or so books he’s created, there is a core of three that are referred to as an autobiographical trilogy. These are: Alpine Star (A-Jump, 2006), Emmett (The Ice Plant, 2010) and Lick Creek Line (Mack, 2012). This is as good a place to start as any.

Alpine Star. Photo by Motto Distribution.

Alpine Star is autobiographical but in a most un-egotistical way. It’s a collection of photographs, I think re-photographed but I’m not sure, taken from the small home-town newspaper his mother kept him subscribed to after he’d left Idaho for graduate school and a teaching career. The images are all strangely extraordinary, black and white, and extracted directly from the newspaper, complete with Ben-Day dots. They feature everything from a bridge being washed out by a river to strange and unsettling pictures of people we don’t know.

From Alpine Star. Photo by Saint Lucy.

What’s most extraordinary to me is the way the book reads, thanks to Ron’s selection and sequencing, and the rich experience the book delivers. It’s both surreal and all too real. That a photographer would make an autobiographical book using the images of other photographers strikes me as a profound commitment to art over self-interest. After all, they’re not even his photographs. Except, now maybe they are.

Even the book’s format is non-self-aggrandizing. It’s a paperback measuring 8 1/2 x 6 1/4 inches, and published in an edition of 500 copies which, for 2010, was a small print run.

Emmett. Photo by Ron Jude.

The follow-up book in the trilogy is another slim and just slightly larger volume called Emmett. This time the book features Ron’s photos, but they are pictures he made in the 1980s when he was in high school in rural central Idaho. Thirty years later, Ron found the photos he’d taken in his youth in a shoe box at his parents’ house. The stars of the photographs are nature, Ron’s friend Kenny, and Pontiac GTOs, his friend’s favorite car. We see drag races, trees, teens kissing, images from television screens and, of course, Ron’s shaggy-haired blond best friend.

Spread from Emmett. Photo by Dashwood Books.

Nowhere do we see a photo of this autobiography’s author, Ron Jude. Instead, we see inside his teen-age life courtesy of his eyes. Who is Emmett? I believe it’s the small town north of Boise where the drag races occurred, if I remember correctly from a talk Ron gave. An epilogue of two photos closes the book. The first appears to be an alleyway in a Mexican village, or something like that. The second is of the almost-identical view but with a torrent of water rushing toward the alley.

From Lick Creek Line.

As Ron has described it, these two photos are a prelude to the third book in the trilogy, Lick Creek Line, which opens (after two preliminary images) with five photographs in a row of a violent cascade of water. Now we’re looking at a more substantial paper-bound, 11 1/2 x 10 inch, 112 page book published by Mack. And the photos are all Ron’s, made much closer to the year of publication.

Lick Creek Line. Photo by Jorg Colberg.

The title is enigmatic. The photographs are enigmatic. The subject matter is enigmatic. But I found that after five “readings” of the book I started to piece together a sense of what might be going on. And I always found the experience deeply rewarding. I don’t really want to give you my take on that, however, because, like David Lynch, I don’t believe a work of art should be explained. Too much of the actual experience of the book gets taken away from you if I were to do so.

I will say that I discovered themes, such as the new and the old built environments within the place near where Ron grew up. There’s a theme of paths, and of a person—a person who appears to be a trapper, hence the title Lick Creek Line, which is the line of traps the fur trapper runs along that creek. There is a flitting sense of seeing this man’s life and existence, but it’s fleeting. Much the way his livelihood is fleeting. There’s a sense throughout of Ron as witness to change. But perhaps I’ve said too much already.

Joachim Brohm. Photo by Inn Situ.

The German photographer Joachim Brohm said, during a talk given at the Hartford MFA session in Berlin—a session I was fortunate to visit this past May—that “A book is an object that gives you an experience.” So much in life is too easily consumed and forgotten, and a book like Ron’s is a great gift of puzzlement, searching, and uncertainty. I’m just pointing you in the direction of Ron’s work. Much of the joy it gives comes from each one of us coming to find its meanings in our own way.

Needless to say, Lick Creek Line is very different stylistically from the other two books in the trilogy. And yet they all offer a similar experience of discovering and uncovering meaning. And this is something that deeply inspires me in Ron’s work. Were I to write about some of his other books, you would find each one is an exploration of what a photobook can be, and of what photography can look like. There is no one Ron Jude style, counter to the advice so many receive in portfolio reviews that you should develop a signature, recognizable, and therefore brandable and sellable style.

From Lick Creek Line.

Check out Lick Creek Line to see what you think. And I encourage you, if you find that interesting, to look at Ron’s other books and consider adding them to your library of possibilities. Some of these include:

Executive Model. (Libraryman, 2024 second edition.) A Ron’s-eye view of businessmen in the street.

12 Hz. (Mack, 2020). A brilliant visual engagement with the cthonic forces of the earth.

Nausea. (Mack, 2017). Photographs made in an abandoned school that make ghosts real.

Vitreous China. (Libraryman, 2016.) A midwest site of light industry becomes a mix of writing by Mike Slack and photos by Ron Jude.

Lago. (Mack, 2015.) Ron returns to the childhood site of the California desert and the Salton Sea.

Fires. (RAM Publications, 2013). A collection of photographs from previous works for a show at Museum of Contemporary Photography.

Other Nature. (The Ice Plant, 2008.) Visual questions about what is nature, what isn’t.

.

Adequate Images

I have never forgotten renting the short film called Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe back in the 80s. It was directed by Les Blank, who asked if he could film while Herzog fulfilled a promise he’d made to Errol Morris. Morris was a grad student and was complaining to the director about the difficulties of making his documentary Gates of Heaven. To push him along, Herzog vowed that if Morris completed the film Herzog would eat his shoe. Eventually the film was finished, Morris’s career as a director was born, and Herzog found himself one evening at the famous restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley.

Werner Herzog. Photo by Robin Holland.

Chef Alice Waters had cooked the Clark Desert Boots—the shoes Herzog was wearing when he made the vow—in a garlic and herb-infused duck broth for five hours, While Blank rolled camera, Herzog sat in front of an audience with a tin snips and a Heineken and talked about art as he slowly consumed his shoe.

Alice Waters. Photo by Platon.

Watching the film way back then was like drilling holes in my skull and standing in a torrential downpour. My head was filled with Herzog’s words. I will quote one of the most important statements I’ve ever heard about visual arts:

Give us adequate images. We, we lack adequate images, our civilization doesn't have adequate images. And I think our civilization is doomed, is gonna die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images.

This is one of the two ever-persistent koans that I’ve meditated on throughout my photographic practice. The other was a directive from Robert Lyons, the head of the Hartford Art School MFA I attended, who said to me, in the face of my intellectualizing: “There are different kinds of intelligence. There’s a retinal intelligence.”

Robert Lyons.

Back to Herzog. Over and over I pondered the question, What is an adequate image? I accepted Herzog’s assertion whole-heartedly. I just didn’t really know what it meant. Years later I found out that Garry Winnogrand was also deeply impacted by Herzog’s statement. Yet clearly Winnogrand and everyone else who has struggled with this conundrum has come up with different answers. And that’s probably exactly the point.

It strikes me that the definition of an “adequate image” quite likely changes by the decade, year, day, and hour. What was once adequate might not be adequate any longer. Conversely, there are many of what seem to me to be inadequate images made today while the photographs of Harry Callahan or Alexey Brodovitch feel entirely adequate sixty years later.

Photo by Harry Callahan.

So how do we know what’s adequate and what isn’t? I think, more than anything, there’s a feeling that is often nearly instantaneous that signals the answer. Perhaps this goes back to Robert Lyon’s term “retinal intelligence.” A study by MIT neuroscientists determined that the brain can process entire images in as little as 13 milliseconds. It turns out the retina is actually made of brain matter, and transmits visual information straight to our brain without any mediation.

I also suspect that each individual photographer exists to expand the number of eyes looking for adequate images on humankind’s behalf. Therefore, the number of photographers out there matters. Because some of us are going to get it right. And the definition of getting it right will constantly change over time.

From Ballet. Photo by Alexey Brodovitch.

I think that, subconsciously at least, we all know what an inadequate image feels like. To me it can feel any of the following ways: familiar, clichéd, safe, manipulative, simplistic, nostalgic, etc. Mark Steinmetz told our cohort at Hartford that “something needs to be at risk” in our photography.

Mark Steinmetz. Photo by Andre Wagner.

Perhaps this is all part of what makes art hard for artists. Its never a question that gets answered, there’s never a sense of landing on the proper way of making an adequate image. Instead, it keeps us off-balance, anxious, uncertain, questioning, and rather desperately hunting. We never get to coast. But I do personally feel, like Herzog, that much is at stake.








Photography and Career

I just read an article in ArtNews titled “What Is Art Good For?” In it, they talk with Stephen Shore. Speaking about his “own journey” in art, Mr. Shore says:

When I first knew I was a photographer, when I was still a child, the world of photography was radically different from what we experience today. There were no galleries in New York that showed and sold photographs. Very few photography monographs were published. The first photography gallery I ever visited, the Heliographers Gallery, opened in 1963, when I was already in my mid-teens. And that gallery sold prints for perhaps $15 or $25. I remember buying a print from W. Eugene Smith, at that time one of America’s best-known photographers, for $25. My point is that photography, then, offered the enticements of neither fame nor fortune. For those of us who pursued it as an art, it was simply a ‘calling.’ I mean this literally. I felt called to it.

Stephen Shore. Photo by Sprüth Magers.

This reminded me of Robert Lyons talking about how he and Stephen Shore were the two youngest photographers in a Minor White workshop. Robert was 15 and a half years old, and went on to have a long mentorship and friendship with Mr. White.

Robert Lyons

It’s pretty hard to imagine thinking about career when you’re 15 and a half years old. Clearly for Robert it was a calling.

I really appreciate Stephen Shore reminding me that it used to be virtually impossible to have an art career as a photographer. It makes my own anxieties about whether or not I have an audience, an exhibition, a gallery begin to recede. It’s like standing at the edge of the ocean looking out..

During my time in the Hartford MFA program I had the privilege of watching Bryan Schutmaat open into full bloom. It was incredible how quickly he mastered the 4x5 camera, which he had never used before. And to witness his deep, obsessive attention to detail as he was sequencing what would become Grays the Mountain Sends, his first photobook, which went on to win all the awards and position him for a Guggenheim.

Photo by Kominek Books.

Then, and since, I never heard Bryan talk about career in any way. He talked to me instead about the emotions he wanted the viewer to have looking at his photographs. He talked about movies and literature and all kinds of other things. (He was the first person I ever had a conversation with about Tarkovsky.) I felt he was called to photography, in the way that Mr. Shore talks about, albeit in a different time with different possibilities.

A year or two after we graduated, Bryan was at our house for one of the dinners I host for visiting photographers, and he was speaking with another somewhat more experienced photographer sitting next to him. The other photographer quickly began talking about Bryan’s career strategy. Bryan looked both uncomfortable and embarrassed. It struck me Bryan was mostly listening and being polite.

Now obviously a photographer does not build the career Bryan has without working at it hard. What I’m saying is, I never felt that it was his primary motivation, as it might be for other photographers, whose decisions about their next work are driven by positioning themselves in the market. Yet clearly he has made smart choices regarding the art market.

Susan Howe. Photo by Nina Subin.

I remember reading an interview with the poet Susan Howe where she talked about being OK if she only has a tiny handful of readers for her work. This is the world I come from—poetry, and those who are working, as the poet Michael Palmer puts it, “at the margins.” These poets accept that they may not have a large audience. The poet Robert Duncan used to tell us that every poet is guaranteed two ideal readers—the readers who totally get everything you’re doing. You just hope, he said, that both of them aren’t in the past.

Robert Duncan

Stephen Shore is reminding me of that commitment, that willful engagement of the art of photography with no apparent “upside.” Like the painters Jack Whitten and Stanley Whitney, who toiled for years without real recognition, we have to keep going, even when it would be easy to feel defeated.

Stanley Whitney and a detail of one of his paintings. Photos by Lisson Gallery.

As Stanley Whitney tells it, one day he came back to his studio after one of his regular visits to the galleries in Chelsea, and said to himself, “Well, Stanley, you’ve seen what the galleries want. Do you want to keep doing what you’re doing?” And he replied to himself, “Yes, I want to keep doing what I’m doing.”

Let Us Now Praise Slim Photobooks

I listened yesterday to a Nearest Truth podcast in which Brad Feurhelm interviewed my friend from the Hartford MFA program Felipe Russo. Among other things, they discussed the beauty of the shorter photobook. They were talking about Felipe’s book Garagem Automática, which consists of 22 photographs.

I commented to Felipe on Instagram that this book felt to me infinite, but that I realized it’s because the images resonated infinitely for me, despite there being such a surprisingly small number of them. It’s a book that took four years to come about, I think he said, and I bet it could have included so many more images. But Felipe realized that 22 were enough.

Spread from Felipe Russo, Garagem Automática.

I have witnessed the development of multiple photobooks from their naissance to their eventual publication, and I’ve seen a few cases involving a shift from what were tight, powerful edits to something larger. It struck me that the expansion of the work did not necessarily make it stronger. Rather, I wondered if the photobook publishers, and maybe the artists, grew the number of images to fill out an idea of what a serious photobook should be, which is: a large hardcover with between 60 and 80 photographs and well over 100 pages.

My sense is that the initial thread of an idea, or concept, can get lost as the number of images grow, and even the relations between the images can become more tenuous. This might have to do with memory’s capacity to hold onto images and relate them to each other. Or it might be that only so many images can be combined around one concept before either repetition or straying sets in.

Don’t get me wrong. I love images that don’t belong, or that surprise the reader––the hard left turn. But I have a suspicion that photographs sometimes end up included in a book both because of the general feeling that bigger is better, and because they’re really good photographs which the publishers and artists don’t want to leave out. The net result might be a collection of really good photographs that don’t necessarily deliver a unified experience. I think this connects to a revelation I had writing poetry in undergraduate school that once I started taking out words and lines the poems often got stronger.

My favorite Robert Frank book—OK, yes, after The Americans—is Pangnirtung, which only has 27 photographs. I think I read once that he shot the images in a single week while visiting an Arctic village. It has a wholeness and a completeness that inspire me to try to make the same. And while it is a hardcover and is bigger in format, it’s a terribly slim book in the hand. The length allows for multiple “readings” in one sitting, which, for me, leads to a deeper contemplation of the book and its images.

The photographer Uta Genilke in Hamburg has been issuing a series of short, slim books, each serving a different theme or idea, and each of which feels like a full and complete piece. She prints these in small editions and they’re quite affordable. They also allow me to really feel the artist’s thinking through images and sequencing. Doing several shorter books I think also gives her a chance to address more ideas than trying to fit more photos under one title.

Uta Genilke. Sacre.

My personal favorite book by Bryan Schutmaat is Good Goddamn, which has 27 photographs made during a going-away celebration between two friends, one of whom was about to head to prison. (It wasn’t Bryan.) The work feels terribly personal and the emotions lift off the pages like mist. I believe Bryan said somewhere that it’s more of a zine, which I disagree with. It’s a book. It’s just a slim book. But to me it’s equally as important as his other longer books. (Brad Feurhelm and Felipe Russo mention that they believe a slim book is not automatically a zine.)

Bryan Schutmaat. Good Goddamn.

And while I love Michael Schmidt’s epic cloth-bound tome Lebensmittel, which clocks in at 264 pages, I find myself more frequently looking at Waffenruhe, a paperback which has 38 photos. I can’t imagine anything is missing at that length, and not a single image in the book feels superfluous.

I might also contrast Waffenruhe with John Gossage’s Berlin in the Time of the Wall, a monumental 464 page book, which I looked at very carefully and completely. Once. I haven’t taken it down from the shelf since. There are many extraordinary photographs in that book, but it’s an ordeal just to turn through the pages

Michael Schmidt. Waffenruhe.

Not that longer photobooks necessarily have superfluous images, but I suppose I’m saying that for me slim books often have more impact and hold me in the images, the idea, and the mind of the photographer longer. Yet I think many in the photobook world still see the big important hardcover as the highest accomplishment. I applaud the photographers who are gravitating toward shorter books that don’t make a grand statement but often speak more forcefully and more compellingly than their lengthier brethren.

When Did We Lose Our Desire to Understand?

The massive and labyrinthine show of Diane Arbus photographs currently at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory was recently reviewed on the Hyperallergic website by Hakim Bishara. “The era of Diane Arbus’s cold, classist gaze is dead, “ he pronounces in the lede sentence. “Her “freak” photographs,” he continues, “of disabled, disfigured, and disenfranchised people she ambushed with a camera in asylums and hospitals were morally challenged when she made them between the late 1950s and early ’70s, and have only soured over the decades.”

Diane Arbus

He goes on to critique the fact that she came from a privileged family that owned a department store, as if that somehow disqualifies her as an artist and the work she produced. “Arbus was in her natural element in New York’s high society,” he asserts.

Interesting. Had he read her biography and dug into her life he might have come to understand just how much she felt like a freak herself, and how she more likely identified with the marginalized people she photographed than the social milieu in which she was raised. But the pulse of curiosity seems to be absent from his entire review. This complicated, suffering, and imperfect artist is instead basically cancelled, together with her work.

John Ashbery

One of my favorite art critics to read is John Ashbery, though he is fairly dead. His reviews focus on trying to understand what’s going on in the art. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that he was an accomplished poet who had created many significant works in his life and maybe had some measure of compassion for the artists who were trying to do the same. I can’t say.

John Yau

I also depend deeply upon the reviews in Hyperallergic by John Yau, a former student of Ashbery’s and a poet, to guide me towards artists I’ve never heard of, and who often end up being very important to me.

Robert Creeley

In 1974 I took a reading class at the University of New Mexico from Robert Creeley on contemporary poetry. Creeley was a writer who was credited by many as one of the most important lyric poets of his generation, and who was associated with the Black Mountain school of poetry, which is where he both taught and studied after dropping out his senior year from Harvard. In our class with Creeley, we read many poets who I’m sure he did not see eye to eye with, nor feel much affinity for, but he led us through their work with the sincere intent to understand what they were doing without dismissing any of them.

Robert Duncan

The poet Robert Duncan used to say that poetry needs all poets. He basically refused to rank in a hierarchy the importance of different poets. And yet he was a poet of great convictions and opinions.

It strikes me that it’s much more challenging to seek to understand an artist than it is to measure them, sometimes 50 or 75 years later, against the moral standards of 2025 and find them to be wanting. I’m actually curious which artists can withstand such scrutiny today. Like, sincerely curious. I wouldn’t know how to make such a list.

I was taken, in reading Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, just how often the “father of psychiatry” admitted he didn’t know something, that he couldn’t have an opinion on it because he didn’t have enough information or it was beyond his expertise. He did this frequently.

Uncertainty. In my personal opinion, this is the heart of art. As artists, perhaps we eventually discover that it’s more useful to seek to understand than it is to know. As for cancelling, I’m not sure what it gives us that’s actually useful.






Why Poetry?

When I was an anthropology minor in undergrad, one of my anthro professors was Alfonso Ortiz, who also happened to be a member of the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo (formerly San Juan Pueblo) in New Mexico. Ortiz told us that one of the world’s problems was that western civilization had been stuck in a closed conversation with western civilization, and that this had been disastrous. He encouraged us to overcome our white awkwardness and attend the multiple Pueblo dances open to the public. He assured us that this was not an intrusion, but an important engagement with another culture and worldview.

Alfonso Ortiz.

I believe the same is true for photography as an art form. When photography only looks at photography, the possibilities within the field become quite limited. After all, photography is barely two hundred years old. The question often becomes, for the photographer, which established form do I pluck from the shelf and fill out? Typology? Documentary? Identity statement? Portraiture? Landscape? Or, even worse, which photographer’s work do I emulate?

Picasso’s painting “Family of Saltimbanques” (1905) inspired one of the Duino Elegies, a series of poems written by Rainer Maria Rilke, who lived with the painting briefly while visiting Duino Castle in 1912.

The same is true for literature, painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, dance, music, and filmmaking—they all need each other to keep the river flowing, to keep from trapping the water in a back eddy. To keep invention, and each particular art, alive and healthy. For that matter, our arts should infect themselves with all kinds of different influences, such as philosophy, astrophysics, history, anthropology, linguistics—you name it.

One of my favorite sayings related to photography is Tod Papageorge’s restatement of Robert Capa’s famous statement, “If your photos aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Papageorge turned it into “If your photos aren’t good enough, you’re not reading enough.”

Anselm Kiefer, “Margarethe,” (1981). Like many other paintings by Kiefer, this one refers to the poetry of Paul Celan, specifically to a figure in Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (1948).

Reading poetry that strives to push into the unknown, rather than stand comfortably in the known and familiar, can give photographers all kinds of ideas about possible structues, subject matters, lack of subject matters, non-linear meaning-making, fragmentation, defamiliarization, recontextualization, and other ways photography might operate. Poetry is the most radical form of language. As such, it hints at what might be possible in our own art involving images.

Given my experience with other photographers and their interest in poetry, but the rather short list of poets I hear referred to, I thought that maybe I could open a few gates and broaden the grazing range (to introduce yet another metaphor—sheesh!). We know, based on the history of other arts, that over time photography will morph and expand photographic experiences and the ways it can create meaning. My thinking is that showcasing some of the less mainstream poets might help to grow the practices at the margins of photography. Because that’s where the innovation happens. That’s where the boundaries of our art are quietly, yet constantly, pushing outward.