The Camera is an apparatus to shed the light from the dark, the view of the world worth preserving from the one you allow yourself to forget, remember the moment you deem decisive and discard the myriads of constellations you consider irrelevant; the good (picture) from the bad. The camera is a moralistic apparatus.

(and here Fukase has burned his negatives; the arrogance of the photographer who assumes a moral position far above the blaze of this world. He wanted to get rid of himself, but everywhere he turned, he was already waiting for himself in the wings.)

His alcoholic intoxication,  the suicide attempt: It is not enough to die; you want to erase yourself from the world as if you never existed.

This impulse that tries to drive us over the edge into banality: The rage against “the good picture.”

It’s difficult to explain, but I like ravens. If I’m reincarnated I want to be a raven.

I’m wishing that I could stop this world. This act[of photography] may represent my own revenge play against life, and perhaps that is what I enjoy most.

— Masahisa Fukase, 1976

A desolate hill, littered. Forms that got on top of that slope might move on to the other side and be invisible.

— Philip Guston

“My idea was to see if I could illustrate a concept of (Harvard philosopher and cinema scholar) Stanley Cavell’s about color having a sense of presentness in time and black-and-white having a sense of nostalgia,” Baltz explains. “Black-and-white is two seconds ago and color is now . . . . You accept the black-and-white as reality and the color seems totally fake.”

— lewis baltz, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-03-29-ca-372-story.html 

Thyssen-Krupp, Duisburg-Ruhrort, June 2017

“Photography is a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking hold of the whole of humanity…”

– Thomas Bernhard, Extinction (1986)

Hafen 1; Mannheim, May 2021

cc: Treat symptoms.
PG: Sure.
cC: That’s what our medicine is all about.
PG: Is to stop somewhere.
Cc: Float. Float for the rest of your life.

— Philip Guston in an Intweviwq; from: I paint what I want to see

“[Capital] has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”

— Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism

“We were a heap of living creatures, irritated, embarrassed at ourselves, we hadn’t the slightest reason to be there, none of us; each one, confused, vaguely alarmed, felt de trop in relation to the others. De trop: it was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these gates, these stones. In vain I tried to count the chestnut trees, to locate them by their rela­tionship to the Velleda, to compare their height with the height of the plain trees: each of them escaped the relationship in which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself and overflowed.. –  And I-soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts-I, too, was de trop…. Even my death would have been de trop. De trop, my corpse, my blood on these stones, be­tween these plants, at the back of the smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been de trop in the earth which would receive my bones, at last; cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been de trop: I was de trop for eternity.”

— Sartre, La Nausée. Paris: Gallimard. 1938

“Photography is a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking hold of the whole of humanity…”

– Thomas Bernhard, Extinction (1986)