Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.

— Samuel Beckett

Beckett’s quote is often read like a Sports-film and somehow made it onto motivational posters. Failing builds character, fail until you eventually succeed, the endless bitterness of lost games and obstacles to overcome, only making the win in the last image even sweeter.

Consider failure from the point of view of the bad photographer: paths leading nowhere, failures ending you in dead ends, the plane of the picture becomes muddy and opaque and teaches you nothing, the photo losing its ability to offer anything about the world, and if you show your pictures to other people, they just shrug and walk away; the numerous times you considered dropping the camera for good.

And of course, we’re talking about a highly subjective, personal experience of “bad.” Takuma Nakahira considered himself and photography-as-such a failure, burned (almost) all his negatives, and turned to drinking instead. But I still remember this video from a couple years later: He rode his bike by the sea with the camera in his hand, smiling, somehow having come back from this, but broken, twisted, weirdly happy like the brilliant fool that he was…

In this light, “failure” takes on a darker shade, as failure is not a means-to-an-end, but it is all we have and all we can hope for; Godot never arrives, your photos will never be “good”, but you still have to traverse the square and find ways to fail better.

There was this sense of accomplishment, the idea of things going somewhere. That seems to have evaporated. There is darkness abound, the path ahead seems obscured, what is behind us is slowly looping back on us, molasses, hard to escape. We’re basically just remxing. There will be a house built. The future shrinking down to some dense, uniform mass. When trying to remember, I have difficult to connect my self now with the things that happened to me. That weird dis-associations that seems to split me into multiple paths taken or committed.

I personally don’t know where we are heading. The only thing that’s clear to me is that I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have an utter contempt for painting. The only thing that interests me is the spirit itself, and I only use the customary artist’s tools – brushes, canvas, paints – in order to strike more precisely. The only reason I abide by the rules of pictorial art is because they’re essential for expressing what I feel, just as grammar is essential for expressing yourself.

— Jean Miro, 1992

After the studies had ended I feel kind of broken: It does not feel like something actually has happened, only time has passed.

Shadows, the ‘sign of true bodies’ as Hans Belting writes, of course saturate the photographic space: as much as with light, photographs are made with shadows, to such an extent, that William Fox Talbot, one of the pionneers of photography, hesitated between this name and skiagraphy, ‘shadow painting’.

— Jonathan Litell, Three Studies on Francis Bacon

A house must be built: People must gather, things have to come together, a sense of direction infused into many minds. The cruelty of the next morning. There was dancing.

we lack words for landscapes.

You know that I care
What happens to you
And I know that you care
For me too

So, I don’t feel alone on the weight of the stone
Now that I’ve found somewhere safe to bury my bone
And any fool knows a dog needs a home
A shelter from pigs on the wing

The room is dimly lit, with the only source of illumination being a flickering, bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The air is thick with the smell of stale cigarette smoke, lingering from countless previous guests. The faded floral wallpaper peels at the corners, revealing the passage of time.

In one corner of the room stands a worn-out bed with a faded floral bedspread that has seen better days. The mattress sags in the middle, leaving an imprint of the countless restless souls who have rested there. A single, dim bedside lamp with a frayed shade casts long shadows across the cracked nightstand, where an ashtray overflows with cigarette butts.

Against the opposite wall, a big, clunky television sits atop a scratched wooden dresser. The TV screen emits a constant flicker of white noise, the grainy static providing a disconcerting soundtrack to the room’s eerie atmosphere. The dresser itself is adorned with chipped paint, and its drawers squeak with protest when pulled open.

A single, threadbare armchair sits near the window, its upholstery worn thin from years of use. The heavy, moth-eaten drapes are drawn shut, allowing only thin streaks of muted streetlight to filter through the accumulated grime. The room feels frozen in time, a forgotten relic from a bygone era.

As you step further into the room, the floor creaks beneath your weight, and the silence is broken only by the distant hum of city life outside. It’s a place where secrets linger in the shadows and the air is heavy with the ghosts of the past,

Nothing is more painful, more frightening than thinking that slips away from itself than fleeting thoughts that, barely conceived, disappear again, already gnawed by forgetting or rushing into others that we have just as little control over… We constantly lose our thoughts. That’s why we cling so doggedly to established opinions.

— Gilles Deleuze

Film-stiil from Man Ray’s: “Les Mystères du château de Dé” (1929)