Author: JH

Another note on that German thing: I’m sure most of you have looked at the online excerpts of Karl Hoecker’s Auschwitz photo album which has been all over the news in recent days (a good edit is here).

A friend of mine just sent me this link to Heinrich Himmler’s infamous Posen-Speech, from a secret meeting of SS officers in Poland on October 4, 1943.

If you found the photos from Auschwitz chilling, you may want to listen to that speech (subtitles in English). This is how the speech ends: “But altogether we can say: We have carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people. And we have taken on no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character.”

(I am posting this because I think that your cultural background together with your mindset will finally determine what kind of images you make. Now back to more traffic cones.)

New York artists escape to Germany. Or was it the other way around? Trust me––you get what you pay for…

I’ve always regretted the fact that German journalists, compared to the Brits, just don’t seem to know how to tell a story. After former host of the German “Tagesschau”, Eva Herman, finally got fired the other week (see “Motherhood Crusader Goes Back To The Kitchen” here), most journalists who bothered to cover this story failed to provide the quote that actually led to the firing. That’s sad, since Herman’s quote, at least in my book, ranks as one of the most lucid things that have been said about the Third Reich, ever. Herman: “Many things in the Third Reich were really bad, for example Hitler” (but some things on the other hand, she continued, were really good).

That is, I think, like saying “many things are really bad about contemporary photography, for example the photos.” I find this logic most refreshing and strongly intend to apply it to a number of future entries myself.

Speaking of Germania, 73-year-old Cardinal of Cologne, Joachim Meisner, has now turned into an art critic: “Modern art is at the risk of degenerating… when culture is disconnected from divine reverence, the cult descends into ritualism and culture degenerates. It loses its center”. Well, I couldn’t agree more. See here.

Back to my divine traffic cone project now.