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A much more monsterous take on Mårten Lange

To continue with the theme of my last post, here is a richer and deeper and riskier take on Mårten Lange’s Ghost Witness by Lewis Bush, published in C4 which makes sense). 

https://c4journal.com/marten-lange-ghost-witness

He jumps in with references to Hobbes which leads to Marx and of course the question of utopia and its monstrous offspring in contemporary China, the skyscrapers. Which is much closer to the matter that Lange seems to be dealing with. 

Yet it’s a short article, and not as much a review as a parallel commentary related to what Lange’s work sparks for the reviewer. Which is fine. Because it treats Lange’s matter as much bigger than some other reviews I’ve read. 

Yet the reviewer didn’t find either the time or the impetus to address the emotional and spiritual impact of Lange’s photographs, which I think of as stirring the inarticulate forces which dwell in an underworld we carry within us--elemental forces that are so simple we don’t even recognize we have a relationship with them. 

To me these are just as important as the intellectual, cultural, and historical matter of the work.

[douglowell]

Mårten Lange is politely masquerading as a human.

I was recently reading an interview with the photographer Mårten Lange conducted by Yuan Di (https://bit.ly/3QbdGGk), who I’m sure is a wonderful person. I would most likely enjoy having a drink with Di at an airport bar while we were both waiting for our separate planes.

That said, reading the article I soon realized that Lange was calmly and adroitly keeping his cover intact while offering sufficiently banal answers to distract his interrogator from the tentacles slithering in and out of Lange’s pants leg. 

Di persisted with questions about Lange’s observations of the way in which China has changed and about his “strategy” and what it was he was "trying to say.” I’m still quite impressed at Lange’s restraint as he declined to swallow the interviewer head-first and then move on with his day.

A photographer like Lange makes photographs that demand much more interesting questions than that. Just look at the images I swiped from the article. Do these have anything to do with “strategy” and “messages” and the recent changes in China? 

No, they have to do with something else entirely. I’m not even going to try to begin. But a mere human reporter had a close call. 

(All images from Mårten Lange, Ghost Witness. See his work at https://www.martenlange.com.)

@mrtenlange

[douglowell]

Eight years ago I was trying to crowdsource the publishing of my photobook, Orion. Well, this year I was able to publish it on my own, in an edition of 100 copies. You can now buy your own copy on Amazon. https://amzn.to/3J85cNv

[douglowell]

So, it’s been five years since I’ve posted on Tumblr. Here’s what I missed in those years: the combination of words and photographs. (I happen to like both.) Instagram is good for images, but not so much for words. Or thinking. Or anything like a conversation. It’s so one-way.

So let’s see if this venerable old micro-blogging thingy picks up momentum again. 

Photo: from my photobook Orion, published in 2022. Available on Amazon. https://amzn.to/3J85cNv

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Les derniers exemplaires de Selektor III : Missy Prince sont à chercher du côté de sa boutique en ligne. Soutenez son travail en lui achetant le magazine - ou un de ses tirages - directement.

The last copies of Selektor III: Missy Prince are available in her online store. Support her work by buying the magazine - or a darkroom print - directly from her.

http://missyprince.bigcartel.com

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On the title

Aram Saroyan has generously granted me permission to use his one-word poem--and surely his most famous poem--for the title of my current photographic work. That poem is:

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You can find it reprinted in the marvelous new collection of Saroyan’s all-so-important poetry, Complete Minimal Poems, with a fine and surprisingly minimal introduction by Ron Silliman. 

https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Minimal-Poems-Aram-Saroyan/dp/0985136480/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1480185885&sr=8-1&keywords=aram+saroyan

[douglowell]

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Three years ago I sorely needed to turn from a darker-themed work of mine to something more hopeful and luminous. So I looked to the Italian Renaissance and began reading it’s greatest philosopher, Marsilio Ficino.

This age of neo-platonism was also the time when Jewish mysticism first penetrated into Western thinking through Ficino’s friend, Pico della Mirandola. And so I also began reading the Zohar (new Pritzker edition), considered the most significant book of the mystical tradition known as the Kabbalah. It was written by Moses de Léon in the 13th century, but it reveals a practice and understanding that was centuries old.

At the heart of the Zohar is a structure known as the Sefirot, which are ten eminations (Sefirah) which manifested when God first decided to separate from an undifferentiated unity and enter into form. The flow of this process led down to the material world and us--who are not separate from God, but part of the same flow.

But the flow also works upward as well, since the sacred marriage of Tif’eret (male) and Shekhinah (female) are dependent upon the efforts of humans to bring them together, and hence to perpetuate the flow.

Each of the ten Sefirot contain different qualities--for instance, Keter, at the top, is virtually pure compassion, while Gevurah (the fifth) is power and judgement (and also the origin of all evil in the world). My current work, lighght, is divided into ten sections accordingly.

The scholar Arthur Green, in his important book Guide to the Zohar, has this to say about the Sefirot: “The inner structure of psychic life is the hidden structure of the universe; it is because of this that humans come to know God by the path of inward contemplation and true self-knowledge.“

So, for whatever it’s worth, and for anyone interested, this is some background on the structure behind the photographs I’ve been posting and my newest work.

[douglowell]

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