Notes From Nowhere

Another day, another dollar: Panasonic is paying me two million dollars to say that their little digicams are great (or at least they should). So here we go: Panasonic, your little digicams are great! This from yesterday, my only day at the pool for the summer it seems – today we’re back at 12 degrees Celsius…

I’ve returned to the mountains for a few more days. Now, after Bernd Becher’s death, maybe someone should, just for a few decades or so, photograph mountain huts. The disappearing mountain huts. The disappearing mountain huts with their fascinatingly similar shapes, seemingly built with a great deal of attention toward design. Of course, only from a straightforward, “objective” point of view, and only under a cloudy sky. I see myself, 30 years down the road, saying something like this in an interview: “I’ve always said that I am documenting the sacred buildings of alpine farming. Alpine farming rejects all forms of art and therefore never developed its own architecture. The buildings I photograph originate directly from this purely agricultural thinking.”

Or maybe not. And in spite of the irreverence of posting this right now, I admit that I’ve spent some time walking in the mountains and thinking about the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher lately (I should stop reading interviews given by artists altogether though), and their surely well-deserved place in the art history of the 20th century. Or, at the very least, in the history of our capacity to perceive beauty where earlier generations only saw the dust of coal.

More on my Mountain Project in August. (And, yes, at this point these are about the only two out of approximately 80 images from that project that have something manmade in them – in the end I may even drop them for that very reason.)

This from earlier this week, from the plains. While, on a hot summer day in Manhattan, car and bus engines run relentlessly (often without a driver present), and air condition blasts away so that the planet’s energy resources deplete faster than the battery level of my notebook (that is without the current power outages of course), Germans now build houses that get 50+ percent of their heating and hot water supply from solar energy panels on the roofs. At the same time the houses are built so that they stay cool in the summer *without* air condition. Best of all, this goes along with cool, modern architecture! Or look at this new building complex, next to a nature park, where (I’m told) some rare types of grass are being preserved.

But then, nature is so last century – and in the spring it even causes allergies…