Karl & Coco

Art is always difficult, but it is especially difficult when it comes to telling other people’s stories. And it is ferociously difficult when those others are tangled up in your history and you are tangled up in theirs. What honors those we look at, those whose stories we try to tell, is work that acknowledges their complex sense of their own reality. Good photography, regardless of its style, is always emotionally generous in this way. For this reason, it outlives the moment that occasions it. Weaker photography delivers a quick message — sweetness, pathos, humor — but fails to do more. But more is what we are.

I believe that there are people who think as I do, who have thought as I do, who will think as I do. There are those who will live, unconscious of me, but continuing my attitude, so to speak, as I continue, unknowingly, the similar attitude of those before me.[…] How much of my brain is wilfully my own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what I have read and heard and lived? Sure, I make a sort of synthesis of what I come across, but is that all that differentiates me from another person? — That I have banged into and assimilated various things? That my environment and a chance combination of genes got me where I am?

Learning to believe in yourself won’t always be easy. There’s no simple cure to self-doubt—that voice inside you that says “I will never be good enough.” That is why you should take care of your doubt—hold its hand in the rain and remind it that you are a human being and it’s okay for you not to be perfect. It’s okay for you to take longer than others. It’s okay for you to fail, it’s okay for you to learn and it’s okay for you to try again.

It is instructive to think that there is not a single person in this room, or for that matter in any room in the world, who, at some nicely chosen point in historical space-time, would not be put to death there and then, here and now, by a commonsensical majority in righteous rage. The color of one’s creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in time or space with a fatal objection from a mob that hates that particular tone. And the more brilliant, the more unusual the man, the nearer he is to the stake. Stranger always rhymes with danger. The meek prophet, the enchanter in his cave, the indignant artist, the nonconforming little schoolboy, all share in the same sacred danger. And this being so, let us bless them, let us bless the freak; for in the natural evolution of things, the ape would perhaps never have become man had not a freak appeared in the family.

It is instructive to think that there is not a single person in this room, or for that matter in any room in the world, who, at some nicely chosen point in historical space-time, would not be put to death there and then, here and now, by a commonsensical majority in righteous rage. The color of one’s creed, neckties, eyes, thoughts, manners, speech, is sure to meet somewhere in time or space with a fatal objection from a mob that hates that particular tone. And the more brilliant, the more unusual the man, the nearer he is to the stake. Stranger always rhymes with danger. The meek prophet, the enchanter in his cave, the indignant artist, the nonconforming little schoolboy, all share in the same sacred danger. And this being so, let us bless them, let us bless the freak; for in the natural evolution of things, the ape would perhaps never have become man had not a freak appeared in the family.

A reminder for the girls with big plans

Something I find so important but haven’t talked about before is progress. Progress can be something hard to measure when you’re living moment by moment, unable to remember a time when what you’re struggling with right now was even harder when you started. It’s so extremely difficult to congratulate ourselves for small levels of progress when each moment we’re comparing ourselves to our end goal, the people we see online, what our peers are able to do and we’re striving for. But as we come to the end of the year, let’s just step back for a moment and remind ourselves how far we’ve come from being the people we were at this time last year. Remind yourself that though you might not be where you want to be yet, you’ve made progress and taken steps and that’s just as important.

Everybody gets told to write about what they know. The trouble with many of us is that at the earlier stages of life we think we know everything — or to put it more usefully, we are often unaware of the scope and structure of our ignorance.

I know we will fight, we will scream and we will yell, but we’ll make it through.

Stories are just things we fabricate, nothing more. We search for them in a world besides our own, then leave them here to be found, garments shed by ghosts.

The only problem with not talking to oneself was that oneself was the most fascinating conversational partner one could imagine. Nobody had more patience in listening to one than oneself, and while nobody knew one better than oneself, nobody misunderstood one more than oneself.

As Hegel said, tragedy was not the conflict between right and wrong but right and right, a dilemma none of us who wanted participate in history could escape.