#image_by_image

Dear Anton, Whether we are in amusement parks visiting imaginary cities and castles, or in the museums and gardens that commemorate those who died in war, the carriage of our bodies is the same. We stroll, we turn and gaze, we sit and watch films or explore interactive displays, we reflect on arrangements of stone…

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 Anton, A few nights ago I was on a ferry, crossing a shallow sound below a sky set with stars. The ferry navigated a narrow channel between sandbars and small islands, its way marked by red and green buoys, and lit by a spotlight on its roof to identify upcoming landmarks. It was nearly…

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 Anton, I’m in rural Pennsylvania, sitting by a window in a fieldstone cottage, in a hollow deep in the woods, in the precise location where my father died, seven years ago to the day. I’ve not been back here on this date since, and last night I woke wondering if there might be something…

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 Anton, Of commemoration strategies, the Ise shrine suggests an algorithmic approach. Create a code for us to reenact and embody, in the way of the pilgrimage or the ritual. The instructions are the monument, and the artifacts they describe become symbols offering us paths to meaning. Recently in Budapest I spent some time at…

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 Anton, I’m staying in a rickety long-term occupancy hotel in Montreal, in a room with walls painted too many times, the stink of tobacco, and obscure violence done to the electrical outlets. These streets are filthy in the way of American cities: piles of trash, cigarette butts and a sticky residue of beer on…

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 Anton, This past week I’ve been in Colombo, Sri Lanka. It’s been about a decade since I was last here, and in the interim the country has concluded a nasty war against the LTTE — the Tamil independence movement — and a new, fragile reconciliation government has come into power. Naturally I’ve  been thinking…

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 Anton, Were we to plot on a graph a case for an ethics of the depiction of violence, we might arrive at a formula for action, and even an aesthetically pleasing image. Perhaps a cartesian chart in which each decision falls into the appropriate quadrant, based on our metadata. We know that to create…

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 Anton, I’m reminded that it is an anecdote about the witnessing of corpses upon which Plato’s definition of justice pivots. This is the famous story of Leontius coming upon bodies from a public hanging, and then arguing with himself about whether to look at that “fine spectacle.” He is torn between the desire to…

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 Anton, Your story about forced witnessing of the dead seems biblical. Punishment for willed ignorance, is that what’s behind the photographic impulse to depict atrocity? What result should we expect – acknowledgment that not looking is a form of complicity, or a more fundamental transformation in which the future doesn’t reflect the past? Whether…

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 Anton, In the arena where our champions fight, everyone watching is now also bearing witness, and with a recording device. We have flipped the ratio of watchers to watched. Your photographer is no longer a solitary self astride a landscape, with all of the problematic power relations that implies. Instead, documenting is now evidently…

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 Anton, I’ve been traveling again, and as sometimes happens, through the long hours tucked into seats on airplanes, buses and trains, or queuing in passport controls, boarding zones and platforms, time slips and I fall into muteness and waiting. Were we on a stage, we would feel a stubborn quiet before the world, and…

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 Anton, What happens to us when we can no longer trust the curators? We know that, in our webs of perception and interpretation, we necessarily apply our own filters, and we mislead ourselves, for truths are difficult to find and slippery to hold. As curators and editors we are fallible, and we struggle to…

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 Anton, It seems to me that our information age has entered a period of profound nostalgia. With the growth of digital networks overlaying our societies, we have the ability to communicate with any individual or group, and we have bypassed the imagined sense of a center fostered by our previous, mass communications structure. While…

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 Anton, As I think about your cranes and presses, of their finely tuned efficiencies, and how we contort ourselves in order to operate them, it seems to me that the machines we build have become engines for our moral ordering. Maybe they are the embodiments of our inner Victorians, and that would make sense,…

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 Anton, Something about flying makes us feel vulnerable. Perhaps it’s obvious – the effects of speed, of altitude, of proximity to others. Recently on a flight I watched a documentary on the making of Steve McQueen’s gorgeous, doomed film about Le Mans. McQueen was obsessed with capturing the feeling of speed, and devised unusual…

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 Anton, The snow has arrived early in northern New York, near the mountains, where I am now. All the tropes of wintry comfort are here: the hissing fire, the hush, the spindrifts, the weighed branches embowering us in the forest, the glowing windows of distant neighbors. I would like to say that I am…

Dear Ivan, In light of yesterday’s events, there is undoubtedly a lot to say.  I was silent for an entire day yesterday, thinking. I had hoped that the worldwide trend towards nationalism and isolationism would not manifest itself powerfully enough to claim the 2016 US presidential election. Yet, I had resigned myself to the realisation…

Dear Anton, It’s early, today in New York. I woke thinking about velocity. The speed of a pulse, of a neuron firing, of the city’s oscillating hum, of jet engines, their comforting whine. The tempo of each could be a measure. It’s been a month of travel: Madrid, Barcelona, Carrara, rural Pennsylvania, New York, soon,…

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 Anton, Manifestos, it seems to me, often hinder dialogue. Declarations of intent, ideology, scope which say: the thinking is settled, and now it is time to act. I wonder if it is possible to write a manifesto that admits continued discussion of its claims. We could for instance consider the organic structure of a…

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 Anton, As with your imagined farewell in Kyushu, the Russians sit in silence prior to leave-taking. I have often sat that way, on suitcases or on the edges of chairs, near the doorway. I wonder about your absent couple and their memories, the outward-pointing slippers suggesting a departure, and whether they even recalled that…

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 Anton, A few days ago I visited the Beinecke Rare Book Library, at Yale University. Gordon Bunshaft’s building is an opaque cube. Outside light filters through thin sheets of Vermont marble, creating a cool glow that triggers a sense of activity outside the silent archives within. The books are housed in a multi-story, climate-controlled…

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 Anton, I realized this morning that we in this hemisphere sit on the shoulder of a season, and that as with other phase shifts, turbulence is likely. Your prismatic energy at the end of your most recent trip reminds me that passions without objects scatter and dissipate. They are what we exhale, what we…

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 Anton, I have difficulty with the perspective of middle distance. We privilege urgency of detail, the proximate or immediate, or we reflect and abstract, considering scale and distance from a remove. What falls between feels like blindness. It may be the incessant claims of a present-driven Internet, in which even the strongest ideas 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 Anton, Virtual reality has been a persistent idea underlying our conversation – an image field that completely covers our sight, and all sound and movement, functioning as a totalizing force over our perceptions. As with your images of blue skies, or our color fields, lensless eyes and cameras. The current version of VR we’re…

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 Anton, It’s probably not a good idea to read about the Holocaust before bed. I had thought to shift to a lighter topic today, but I dozed off reading the following passage in Bloodlands, and it’s too relevant to your last note not to share: “Our contemporary culture of commemoration takes for granted that…

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 Anton, I read today in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands that Hitler proposed to kill “anyone who even looks at us askance,” and suddenly understood your choice to photograph the blue skies above Nazi camps. This is also a kind of oblique view, a side-glance. You are performing the inverse of Hitler’s threat, looking with suspicion…

Dear Ivan, Today, on the first day of my next Blue Skies journey to the Buchenwald and Flossenburg concentration camp clusters, I’m yet again traveling through history within the present. As with your empty seabed, I am struck each time, by the silence. It’s not absolute, but there’s always a felt absence. Walking the grounds…

Dear Anton, The mural of the boy with the carbine rifle comes from a museum in a small town in western Kazakhstan called Aralsk. It was once a port town on the edge of the Aral Sea, until the Soviets drained the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, beginning in the 1960s, to irrigate cotton…

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 Anton, The MIT Media Lab presents itself as an embodiment of light and transparency. Glass curtain construction, open floor plans and internal glass walls offer visibility into its workings. But closed and locked doors sit at the perimeter of the labs, and there are secrets in the construction of the technologies themselves, concealed by…

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 Anton, All day we were hammered flat by the heat. Toward evening the wind arrived, and tossed and bent the bamboo behind the house. I hurried to finish my work in the garden as the sky spat. A single crash of thunder, the peaty scent of ozone, and then, nothing. The night arrived 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 Anton, Thinking about your mountain of Italian marble, both its physical mass and the historical burden we’ve asked it to bear. An image for you in response, something playful, perhaps an antidote. Recently at the Imperial War Museum in London I spent some time with a newsreel of the battle of Stalingrad, including an…

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 Anton, I’ve been watching the football in the hip bars and steakhouses of Mariupol. Microbreweries, craft hamburgers, bearded and coifed patrons, tattoos of flowers, Chinese characters, other markers of global fashion. Some of the cafes are run by people who fled Donetsk. Some of them receive international development funds. Many have families across Europe…

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 Anton, In Mariupol I’ve been avoiding the mid-day sun. The light refracts off the Sea of Azov, harsh and clear, unless the wind blows haze over the city from the Illich and Avostal steel plants. Which has led me to a belated realization: when you speak of finding your sunshine, you don’t mean…

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 Anton, I’m on a train south from Kyiv. It’s early, I’m drowsily scanning the fugitive patterns in the worked and ordered land. The scrubby forest, the sandy tracks that snake through the trees, occasional stands of fir. Villages with wooden homes, dachas, and ubiquitous concrete-clad apartment buildings. The megaliths of Ukraine’s industrial heartland, the…

  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 Anton, The Esplanade des Invalides in Paris is scruffy and untended. Rutted paths lead under the lindens to the British Council, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to Napoleon’s tomb. Underneath it is a parking lot; at intervals throughout the territory narrow concrete stairs lead down to it, looking a great deal like the entrance…

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 Anton, At night lying in the dark, I can feel my heart bumping in my ribcage and equally, the slow diminishment of myself. With time comes the desire to build memorials, even to the single life that I have. I think about how to depict or show this feeling, but every expression of it…

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 Anton, The inclination of your figure’s pensive, shadowed head. It may be human or stone; it’s impossible to know. Though it is rare for public statuary to assume an introspective pose. We prefer those we put on pedestals to gaze at the horizon. The public figure on a plinth leads me to think of…

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 Anton, At the base of the columns of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg, Russian boys and girls lingered and flirted, while elderly women in long skirts exited the heavy wooden doors of the nave after prayer. That cathedral, if you’ve never been, spreads its columned arms along Nevsky Prospekt, the heart of the…

    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 Anton, A few weeks ago I was visiting a friend in rural Pennsylvania, not far from where I grew up. He had an old red Alfa Romeo convertible that he rarely drove. I opened a door to a shed where it was stored, the indraft of new air stirring motes of dust, of the…

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 Anton, In the fair city that I currently inhabit, in early summer, a high canopy of trees conceals row houses, bamboo creeps under fences, English ivy over walls. The broad leaves of fig and hosta turn upward to catch the rain. Mornings the streets are skeined with movement. Boys and girls, hair still damp…

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 Anton, You speak of hope, but as I think about what you’re saying, it’s endurance that comes to mind. How you found yourself in that tree might be a mystery, but I can imagine you up there, squinting through branches. It was early spring, the ground was wet and terrain flat. Maybe you felt…

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 Anton, Once we have learned to see shapes, it is most difficult to unsee them. In your image I struggle to interpret  two black dots as anything but eyes, and the shadowed slit as a mouth. During those cold travels with E (I’ll call her E), we discussed sight in its many permutations, as…

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…