Wir durchstießen den Abend mit dem Kopf. Es gab keine Tages- und keine Nachtzeit. Bald rieben sich unsere Westenknöpfe aneinander wie Zähne, bald liefen wir in gleichbleibender Entfernung, Feuer im Mund, wie Tiere in den Tropen. Wie Kürassiere in alten Kriegen, stampfend und hoch in der Luft, trieben wir einander die kurze Gasse hinunter und mit diesem Anlauf in den Beinen die Landstraße weiter hinauf. Einzelne traten in den Straßengraben, kaum verschwanden sie vor der dunklen Böschung, standen sie schon wie fremde Leute oben auf dem Feldweg und schauten herab.

— Franz Kafka, Kinder auf der Landstraße

Maybe more interesting than to describe what we see in the images of “Ein Dorf”, (Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Ludwig Schirmer, Hartmann Books 2024) is what we don’t see. More than 4 billion people now live in urban areas – the number overtook those living in rural areas already in 2007 – today these numbers are probably skewed even more towards the city. While we all largely depend on the food production of these rural areas, the least of us have more than a rough understanding, “how the sausage is made”: Coinciding with the industrialization of food production is an advertising strategy, that more and more recedes into a mystified nostalgia, an almost primitive understanding of how crops and livestock works – how the life in the village is. Which is all the more easy to do, as our understanding of Village-life is already a second-hand one: One that smells of imagined apple pie, young love that goes against the ruling the patriarch, cows grazing leaned against the view of majestic mountains – especially that we only know from movies…

In Germany, this idealized idea of “Heimat” has always been an antidote against reality: In the 50ies the burgeoning “Heimatfilm” (movies, that usually played in the mountains, on huge estates, trumped up conflicts between competing patriarchs, with innocent you lovers caught in between) – the Village has always been a place for escapism (in this case, an escape from the harsh economic realities of Germany after the war and escaping confronting the historical atrocities of fascist Germany).

In the split-off GDR, this mystification found its way into with the ideal of the Arbeiter- und Bauernstaat of real existing Socialism. It is this mystical stage of “The Village”, that is the backdrop of Mahler’s and Schirmer’s book: One of the first images in the image show a young woman ducking under a tree; she wears flat shoes and a plain skirt and her hair braided – she smiles, the sun behind her, the tree and brushes are in bloom, it’s a beautiful spring day.

It is this kind of universality, that makes these images easy to claim. They have a timelessness, that makes them easily adoptable to the many ideologies that ravaged Germany. This is an image that could as easily appear in “Das Deutsche Lichtbild”, a photographic magazine  that continued publishing photography throughout the whole era of the Nazis as in a publication of the GDR to celebrate the “Arbeiter und Bauernstaat”. The insidious malleability of photography lies in applicability to past or even current advertising, where it just as easily can be used to masquerade the industrialization of food production with a veil of innocence and nativeness…

Our concept of “Village” seems to be unfazed by the ideological background that tries to use it for its propaganda: And so these images seem to exist in a void, not showing much of the reality of the GDR, nor the ravaging of capitalism after the wall came down – they just lie there, waiting to be picked up for one “Leitkultur” or another…

References

Franz Kafka, Kinder auf der Landstraße, https://www.textlog.de/kafka/erzaehlungen/kinder-auf-der-landstrasse

Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Ludwig Schirmer: Ein Dorf 1950 – 2022, Hartmann Books 2024, https://hartmann-books.com/produkt/ute-mahler-werner-mahler-ludwig-schirmer-ein-dorf-1950-2022-2/

Since I have been drinking Coffee – which is almost literally all my life – I have been drinking it with Milk and Sugar. Very often with more milk and and more sugar for the Coffee really to be called Coffee. And every so often when I ordered my Coffee and was asked how I would like to drink it it, I answered it with my usual sing-sang of “Milk and Sugar please”. This time, in the plane that took me back from Calama near San Pedro de Atacama back to the Capital Santiago in Chile, I replied with a a “Sugar and …“, adding a slight pause before falling quiet and struggling before I added, searching, reaching for words in my mind that could mean “the other thing that goes with Coffee, please”.

This is what death is: It is a great wiping-out. A destroyer of connections, it tears apart words and their meanings, images and their descriptions, thoughts from the brains that thought them. Images dissolve and fade into colors, shapes loose their meaning, black and white blurs into each other, if you think, your life flashes before you, you’ll be disappointed – you try and fail to form simple sentences, whose meaning you have already forgotten. You start moving through your mind like through a vacated castles, even the echo of your footsteps in the empty hallways become muted before they get replaced by a low, featureless droning Sentences formed eventually trailed of in nothingness: When trying to formulate a thought, you eventually reach in a gelatinous void…

For two hours we had been waiting to cross the border from Chile to Bolivia: The bureaucracy involved with forms to be filled, passports to be examined, slips of paper to be carried between one person and added a byzantine ritual to what seemed like a simple crossing of a border, but we eventually started moving again. We moved on to a brilliantly blue lake, edged with a white frame of marbles, surrounded by serrated mountain edges. I never left the car, waiting for my wife to take some quick photos. I was cold and tired. I had put on my sunglasses and blinked into the bright sunlight. When everybody got back into the car, the driver couldn’t get it to start again, some issues with the ignition or the key – for two hours we sat there in the bright sunlight, waiting for a replacement. When it eventually arrived, I was already gone: I tried to form sentences, but nothing came out of it. I grappled for words, but only grasped at a rapidly expanding nothingness, as my brain was quickly wiped out by a lack of oxygen. When they tried to move me into the other car, I was to weak to put one foot in front of the other, let alone uphold my own weight.  From what followed, I can only report from hear-say, as it this point on I had a complete blackout. While the guide wanted to move forward as planned to La Paz, my wife insisted on going back to Chile. That is probably the one decisions that saved my life: We rushed back to the Chilean border, where they had Oxygen: They waved us through the border-crossing process without making much of a fuzz about (it’s these tiny little things when humanism wrestles down  bureaucracy that somehow restore my faith in humanity…) – and a couple hours later, after a breakneck rush over Andean streets, I ended up in the emergency room of the hospital in San Pedro de Atacama, hooked up with a mask to huge cylinder of oxygen. My brain was still jelly, fog, blankness, vast slabs of nothingness with tiny details blown into gigantic proportions (the incredible blue of the curtain shielding my bunk from the rest of the station, the blotches of chipped enamel on a beige medicine cabinet, the criss-crossing patterns of the greenish linoleum floor…) Everybody was very nice, hushed voices, some even directed at me, which I had issues to follow up upon, I did not yet feel at home in my head again.

The effects of Altitude Sickness are numerous, although the underlying cause is pretty simple: Your brain stops work, as there is no longer enough oxygen to power it’s basic functions. When prone to the disease – and as I have understood, I reside on the opposite side of the spectrum to Reinhold Messner: While he can climb without oxygen onto the K2, I severley endanger my life,  when I venture significantly higher than the East-Sea Shore – your blood turns into a slush in the low pressure and looses it’s capacity to enrich itself with oxygen. The pneumonia I had been nursing the past two weeks probably didn’t help my cause. Altitude Sickness manifests itself in headaches, vomiting, tiredness, confusion, trouble sleeping, and dizziness – most of all, I was tired, I felt like falling and did not enough strength or care enough to do something about it. There is also not a shred of doubt in my mind, as destruction and reconstruction is the nature of our brains, that these events destroy parts of your brain. Connections are lost inevitably, and there is only a whistling-in-the-dark-thought that this opens up avenues to the construction of a new or at least altered me (plus there were some things in my head, like old advertisement jingles, that I would not care too much get eventuallly rid of…)

Hours, days after the event, when I recovered in a Hotel room in San Pedro before we flew to the significantly lower Santiago, I was incredibly sentimental. Waves of compassion and pity washed over me, I broke out into uncontrollable sobbing without any reason. I was reading Dan Simmon’s “Terror”, a weird homunculus of a novel, patched together from different strands of stories. The first, most compelling one is the extremely detailed narrative of expedition into the arctic in the midst of the 19th century in search for the fabled East-West-Passage. The two ships, carefully retrofitted to withstand the gruesome forces of the arctic ice get stuck in the arctic for three years. Simmons brilliantly researched book describes every excruciating detail of life and deaths on these expeditions. The numerous protagonists that all have their specific social and mental background, describe not only the expedition, but the madness of the crumbling British Empire. All that is brilliantly, gruesomely written, down to the medical details of treating frostbite, various ship’s accidents, effects of food poisoning and scurvy. I was sobbing uncontrollably, when the captain after three years of ordeal beat himself up in recounting each and every crew-member of the 125-men strong expedition, while from his tired, scurvy-plagued mind, the faces were slowly fading. While today we rightfully re-assess, recant, condemn and generally try to come to terms with the gruesome, long and far-reaching injustice of Europe’s colonial past, there is also not a doubt, that this was as stupid and brutal a time, as this age of exploration was as heroic and noble time. It always seems to be everything everywhere at the same time… While the other strands of the narrative where less convincing (an inevitable monster chasing the men on the ice, the mythology and the craft for survival of an indigenous tribe the men of the two ships run into), I was nevertheless moved deeply by the book:  You need to decide for yourself, if this was due to my own altered state of vulnerable sentimentality or if the book is actually good…

I looked at the image I had taken before I fell into this void and which with some likelihood (40%, I looked it up…) could have been the last picture I had taken: A curved road vanishing behind a receding hill, some mountains in the distant, photographed in a bland, nondescript manner. I had been feeling off all year, questioning the use of copying the world into a series of flat, five-sided objects, questioning my own capacities of doing anything meaningful with it. If I had somehow expected, that this experience would jolt me out of my stupor and somehow yank me into a rejuvenated view onto creativity, I would be sorely disappointed. I stared down into the image and that flat thing just stared back at me, mute, listless.

Back in Germany, I slowly emerge from my fog. I’ve never had that, this level of bodily fatigue, that ties you to your bed all day, weighed down already by the weight of your sheets. There is no need to throw around these thoughts of mortality around carelessly. It’s only in movies, that people emerge from these experiences of a second chance with new vigor and suddenly turn their life around into an opposite direction. For a brief while, sitting on this cot in the emergency, plans to finish half-baked projects, wrap up images into books, even pick up the camera again with new-found energy. There was even this short burst, when I thought this event would shock me out of this photographic lethargy I found myself in the past year: Needless  to say, that these things don’t happen as “choqs” and it is never the intent and always the follow-through, that decides over what comes out of this….

Questioning the position of Photography is by far nothing new for me: If anything good comes out of this, than it is this sitting-down and writing things up, for better or worse…

When coming back from Chile, I pulled Tim Carpenter’s “To learn to Photograph is to learn how to die”. Of all the photobooks that I had read, this somehow was the one that I wanted to look into to see if it was really as bad as I had remembered it. Or if somehow this had changed my own position in this image-producing universe. If anything, I found it even more preposterous and boring. That feeling I had the first time around, that I would much rather read the people he quotes than read his comments on them: Rather than adding anything meaningful, he manages to drag these quotes down to the level of photographic fortune cookies. Maybe I hate this book so much, because he does exactly what I fear most: These different, color-coded strands of thinking look to me like sloppiness and the inability to form a single coherent thoughts, these randomly sprinkled quotes barely masquerade the absence of an original thought… I have no idea why exactly this book came to my mind: maybe it is because of this question – where is Photography located in this briefly visited space between living and dying. As it was expected, except for this slowly fading sentimentality and this momentous, oceanic feel for the suffering of mankind, I did not bring a lot back. I however object against Carpenter’s preposterous title and it’s over-the-top enthusiasm for what photography can and cannot do: There is nothing to learn about Dying – there is only the doing of dying.

References

Dan Simmons, Terror, https://www.penguin.de/buecher/dan-simmons-terror/taschenbuch/9783453406131
Tim Carpenter, To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die, https://theiceplant.cc/product/to-photograph-is-to-learn-how-to-die/

He could not persuade himself that, if he wrote round about his subject with facility or treated it from any standpoint of impression, good would come of it. On the other hand he was persuaded that no-one served the generation into which he had been born so well as he who offered it, whether in his art or in his life, the gift of certitude.

-James Joyce, Stephen Hero

Understanding is an outlier case in a universe of misunderstandings.

— Pierre Bourdieu

“Why is form beautiful?  Because, I think, it helps us confront our worst fear, the suspicion that life may be chaos and that therefore, our suffering is without meaning.”

— Robert Adams

an archaeology of the now, a reversed excavation, slowly burying things in order to let them be found thousand years in the future that is already lost to us.

Die zunehmende Proletarisierung der heutigen Menschen und zunehmende Formierung von Massen sind zwei Seiten ein und desselben Geschehens. Der Faschismus versucht, die neu entstandenen proletarisierten Massen zu organisieren, ohne die Eigentumsverhältnisse, auf deren Beseitgung sie hindrängen, anzutasten. Er sieht sein Heil darin, die Massen zu ihrem Ausdruck (beileibe nicht zu ihrem Recht) kommen zu lassen. Die Massen haben ein Recht auf Veränderung der Eigentumsverhältnisse, der Faschismus sucht ihnen einen Ausdruck in deren Konservierung zu geben. Der Faschismus läuft folgerichtig auf eine Ästhetisierung des politischen Lebens hinaus. Der Vergewaltigung der Massen, die er im Kult eines Führers zu Boden zwingt, entspricht die Vergewaltigung einer Apparatur, die er der Herstellung von Kultwerten dienstlich macht.

— Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit

“Drop your hands to your sides; they are heavy weights now at the ends of your arms […] reach out and grasp this photograph — small indistinct city street damp black pavement — mounds of earth to the left, poles, long low building, high bright spot from arc-lamp on its standard etc. in the low flat landscape. The muscles in your arms are rigid, the glossy photo surface crinkles in the clutching fingers of your hand your hand the knuckles now gone white. … (It’s the location of the camera which most often determines the character of the particular space — physically you are transferred right there.) As you clutch the photograph the image — a particular space — street curbstones, neat lawns etc., slips, vibrates, collapses under the pressure of your desires. All other photographs clatter on the floor. Now you are left with a single valued section — a single construction — and does it admit others? This condition of attachment will never admit of the ‘theory of sequences’.

David Campany — Jeff Wall: Picture for Women