Anton Kusters

Dear Ivan, Perhaps sitting on a boat and watching the shore is a better perspective. Often I find myself wishing for more distance and less speed. Sometimes I stand on the shore, look out to the sea and imagine setting out. Yet too many on this same sea have fled danger, and are looking at…

Dear Ivan, It seems as if a stage has been set in our conversation. I’m reminded of the master of all stage setting, Charles Chaplin, and specifically The Gold Rush. Seldom has there been a more delicate balance between humor and pathos. Yesterday I was talking to children of Holocaust survivors. They, being older than…

Dear Ivan, I am just home from driving most of the Polish-Czech border, trying to find and photograph the blue skies above each of the 95 World War Two concentration camps of Groß-Rosen. The difference in ways of commemorating struck me, and even though I have no empirical proof, it seems that in Poland and…

Dear Ivan, The irony of ruins that shall be preserved forever is in stark contrast with the deeply ingrained Japanese understanding of the impermanence of things, the circle of life, the passing of moments, most visibly embodied by the yearly bloom cycle of the cherry blossoms and the continuous rebuilding of the Ise Grand Shrine,…

Dear Ivan, I imagine those lines in your images as an installation, as actual layers on the land below, an added dimension. Altering a site of trauma, a site with nothing left to see, by adding context wouldn’t be otherwise  visible. Laying down lines and arrows on the ground, shading areas and blurring others, a…

Dear Ivan, This morning here in London I walked and watched and thought for awhile. Rain was predicted but the sun was still shining and I enjoyed that moment, almost like a reprieve. As I was walking I suddenly realised that I’d how much I’d been struggling with the question of how to show my…

Dear Ivan, One’s moral duty is easy to understand on a personal level: do not do upon others. How can we factor in the right of future generations to be born, the safety of an entire planet, and hold ourselves accountable to a current ethical standard that also reasonably must include them? Plato makes me…

Dear Ivan, Maybe E was looking back to see if her daughters were following, and then inadvertently witnessed that destructive, divine power. Punished for simply witnessing. The tendency to conceal our actions seems to be more important than justifying them. This behavior strengthens my belief that bearing witness may be one of the most powerful…

Dear Ivan, This weekend I was carrying around a too-heavy backpack on my shoulders, stuffed with objects I wanted to show to others. Eager to the point of physical pain. I walked from one place to the other, relentlessly carrying my treasures, as if the solution, the truth, my completeness, was packed inside. On the…

Dear Ivan, I recognise the muteness you describe all too well. I’m often not even traveling when it occurs. Your image could be the inverse of mine: the gaze of the audience, the all-seeing eye, unflinching. We’ve nowhere to hide. We feel watched, and that changes our behaviour profoundly. The audience might indeed be the…

Dear Ivan, The boy stands on the stage. Silent. Mute. He cannot speak, yet he has a world to say. His arms limp beside him like a shirt hanging out to dry on a day too hot with no wind, the sun beating down, everything heavy, even that one white linen shirt that moves in…

Dear Ivan, We need life curators to survive. We trust them to pre-process raw data to information to meaning, so we can spend less energy having to do it ourselves. And we fulfill this role for others, too. It’s a simple and effective survival system which saves time and energy, and scales. We give our…

Dear Ivan, I’ve often fallen victim to this moral anxiety as well, fruitlessly trying to be efficient and organised, with the myth being that one can thereby be in control. It seems to be closely related to the recent adage of “being busy”. I often catch myself feeling that anxiety whenever I can’t display a…

Dear Ivan, The crane in the distance turns slowly, delivering its load. I’ve always been partly perplexed by cranes, not because of my youthful wish to be a cool crane operator, but because they just never seem to be in operation. You see them move on some days, and even then quite slowly. Observations from…

Dear Ivan, Time indeed appears to be slowing down. The Japanese mono no aware, the cycle of life, the acceptance of fleeting moments, is an unstoppable force, gently nudging me toward introspection. This stock-taking also requires that we rationalise the world around us. We turn it inside out to see how we fit within it, and where…

Dear Ivan, I ran into a long lost friend recently. We see each other regularly, but not very often. Let’s say, once every couple of years. Just long enough to have bigger things to catch up on. I often worry about not having the means to create as much as I’d like, forcing me to…

Dear Ivan, Glorification of the future is something I’ve been coming across a lot lately, especially now that I’m reading up on Metabolism, the Japanese architectural movement that rose from the tabula rasa that was Japan in the first half of the twentieth century. The Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, Japan’s imperialism in the 1930s…

Dear Ivan, For the longest time, something about those slippers on the porch of that abandoned house in Kyushu didn’t sit right with me. Who had placed them there, and why had they been left behind? it made no sense. Only much later did it occur to me that it was a subtle, powerful statement…

Dear Ivan, Incipient age indeed. Maybe we should measure our age not in years and the expectancies that come along with them but in the frequency of irreversible things happening to our bodies and minds. The little resignations we make along the way, subconsciously stacking one on top of another until suddenly we realise and…

Dear Ivan, The potholes you describe, that reflex-like looking at only the moment, is exactly what I’ve been forced to do, having relentlessly driven 16,000 kilometres in the last month alone. The point gets hammered in pretty well along the way. And I hate it. I hate seeing the world passing before my eyes, and…

Dear Ivan, Yes, often the cinematic feeling is paramount. And I must confess it’s something I too strive for – even in my still images. And now I’m wondering. I’ve actually never been able to put my finger on it, only being able to recognise being pulled by it. Tokyo Story, The Mirror, Inception. Vastly…

Dear Ivan, I stood at Flossenburg recording the silence at the grounds of the former concentration camp. After I was done, in the distance, I heard the sound of children playing. I didn’t make much of it, until I realised that many post-war houses here are built on the former camp grounds. Families. Life proceeding.…

Dear Ivan, Yet again in a lone hotel room on my travels. Glad they exist of course, but sometimes one longs for a little change. I started The Blue Skies Project to try to understand. I went to Auschwitz four years ago, to comprehend what my grandfather would have faced if he hadn’t escaped an…

Dear Ivan, It’s indeed very hard to resist a fatalistic approach to what’s happening to mankind nowadays. I should stop lamenting this, and thank you for the way out. My mind is now making connections between realities and our depictions. The borders of the Warsaw ghetto constantly being adjusted. The secret mapping so crucial to…

Dear Ivan, I’ve been driving non-stop the last two days. The heat seemed to have made its way from you to me, we’ve had the two hottest days in a long time here in Europe. Storms predicted, and also, none came. As you know, the journey I’m currently undertaking isn’t the happiest one. Time and…

Dear Ivan, The children miraculously survived of Stalingrad, and indeed one of the few images of that devastation I can recall is Evzerikhin’s, along with an image of a man saving what I remember was a contrabas from a devastated building. Just a few days ago I passed through Nice on my way to where…

Dear Ivan, Passing through the city of Carrara here in Italy I’m reminded of our recent conversation about stone and columns and memory. The quarries here in the mountain produced marble for so many sculptures and columns all over the world, linking Michelangelo’s Pietà to the steps of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, to the…

Dear Ivan, I shudder hearing about your experience. Eli Wiesel passed away only a few days ago in New York, a man who taught us that there are moments in which we cannot remain silent. In times like this, one wishes to control space and time, to give the gift of experience to the provocateurs,…

Dear Ivan, The victor writes history as he sees it. I concur. The culture, The identity of a nation shapes its way of looking at events and of writing its history. How else could differing descriptions of the same event exist? Is there even such a thing as a neutral representation? The fallen depicted as…

  Dear Ivan, Opposite the Maginot line in Germany lay the second Siegfried line, or Westwall. The network of concentration camps of Hinzert where I was last week stood right in the middle of it, the camp and sub camp system brought to life in 1938 specifically to use forced labour to construct and fortify…

Dear Ivan, Traveling, driving, chasing the sun here in Germany I can’t help but think about your Nelson image and the events that are unfolding as we speak. Having been trained as a political scientist in a past life, I’m deeply upset. Yes, the cynics among us might tell you that self-serving manipulation is simply…

Dear Ivan, Tomorrow summer starts. Looking out into this gloomy weather here in Belgium, I long for sunny days. I had a breakthrough last night for a new story I’m aching to start. As I was yet again looking at my contact sheets of the preliminary work I had done on location in Kyushu now…

Dear Ivan, It’s indeed striking; I hadn’t noticed it at all. Why would you continue to send those images of stone. Is it to open my eyes to something you’ve seen, the uncontrollable urge we have to eternalise ourselves, to build things that confirm our actions, to validate us? I’ve been reading about our deeply…

    Dear Ivan, In Rome where I am now, a city with a huge past, carved and set in stone by uncountable columns, history has been redefined many times. An act of blurring in and of itself, like the tarp covering the car, never revealing its entirety, only showing every viewer what they want…

Dear Ivan, I agree, and I think you make an important observation with “the act of projecting upon”. Often we forget, as image makers, that there is a necessary second moment of interpretation, by definition out of our control. The first interpretation is obviously that of the photographer making the image, the second that of…

Dear Ivan, How I get into that tree is indeed a mystery, most of all to myself… but I’m fine with that, as long as it keeps on happening. Looking out, I find little more than a vague hint in the distance, and there need not be more. These few seconds of squinting, looking forward…

Dear Ivan, Navigating without seeing is like life: we don’t have the capacity to see where we’re actually going, even though we can  sometimes understand a broader picture. In E, I see a metaphor: as with your image of people walking with umbrellas, we’re constantly navigating with seemingly little context, sunk away in thoughts with…

Dear Ivan, I’m obsessed with context. Saw your image yesterday, and all I could think was “what if this woman were the one who could actually see?” I know, having all of humanity stacked up against you makes it nearly impossible to be considered the norm for correct seeing. And what is  “the norm,” besides…