I struggle with the edit of these massive amount of pictures that I took these three weeks in the US. There are reasons for that apart from the sheer number. The question is basically: What’s the story you want to tell? Is it a story of America in turmoil, shortly before an election that has already ripped the country apart before it even happened? Do you have a political agenda about poverty and rural decline? The beauty of this country? The absurdity? All of it? None of it?

While Burmese Nights was mostly about the inability to comprehend another world, the opaqueness of a country like Myanmar, how you can go there and basically understanding nothing what you see as everything is so completely unfamiliar, with America it is almost exactly the opposite. Having grown up with a steady diet of films, TV, music, books, photos I almost feel that I know America better than I know my own country. This, of course, is both not true and a trap. The fictional America is almost like a second image overlaying what you actually see, obscuring it, rendering reality itself into fiction. Is there a way to sort out what you actually see from what you think you are seeing (the things you have read in a book, seen in a movie)?

I don’t know about that. The canon of american photography makes it even worse: The light there is like a catalyst, that suddenly sets free all these Eggleston-images, the Robert Frank allusions are everywhere, it becomes overwhelming, it becomes competition, you can’t help it but repeat these ghosts, your ego dissolves in other people’s views. I’m starting to like the failed pictures more, they are more myself: When the images are good, they are a shallow echo of what has come before, but my mistakes are mine and mine alone…

So, what about the edit? One teacher of mine (Anja Hitzenberger) once said, that I am more of a volume-guy: There is not this one good picture, and there is not one edit, but several pictures together that start beginning to make sense. At that point I ascribed that to not being particularly good, but maybe this is actually what I am. A volume guy. Still, nobody will look at 5000 images, so I will somehow have to sort them, even without any idea…

“I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do… when I first did it I felt very perverse.”

— Diane Arbus

I picked up this quote from an Article in the Guardian on Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. Since I got wasted by that sobering experience that is reading Susan Sontag’s “On Photography, I seem to be stumbling every so often on articles on the ethics and the perceived emptiness of Photography.

There is this interview on Bruce Gilden’s series “Two Days in Appalachia”, for which he got flamed big time as superficial and exploitative and violating the ethics of documentary and photojournalism. Like he’d care…

And then there is this article in the Huffington Post that bemoans the emptiness of what we got used to call streetphotography. Philipp Lorca diCorcia has his own, mostly indifferent, views on the genre.

And finally I stumbled upon this this disgusting video of Jason Lanier walking through an ethiopian church:

I cannot really tell you, what I found so disgusting about it: His arrogance, his ignorance off his surrounding, his bragging, his entourage waltzing through the church, the fact that he does not know anything about the oppressive system of the churches, that has hauntedEthiopia for centuries now, his gear-whoring. It probably isn’t that bad, and it only appears like it in the light of this black-clothed, ill-tempered woman Susan Sontag, who just seems to be disgusted with most of human endeavours. And rightfully so.

And to top it all off, I yesterday killed what’s left of my good, well-meaning, optimistic mood with watching Amy, the film that depicts the short life of Amy Whinehouse. It’s not like the paparrazzi actually killed her, she obviously did this on her own, but they certainly presented themselves here again as some of the more disgusting members of the human species.

Ethics – in photography or otherwise – is a continuum, with all lines blurry and no clear answers: but there are days, when it feels like the scale between making a picture or letting it be tips heavily into the direction of putting the camera down for good…