#6
"You still have the passion. You're just not an adolescent anymore"
I apologise for another over-a-month long gap since the last newsletter, time is flying past much faster than I’d like. Going forward, I’m aiming to get one of these out at least once every two weeks though so it won’t be such a sparse break from one newsletter to the next!
Below is a mix of the usual, as well as two recent collages of mine.
Last month I read Index Cards by Moyra Davey. For fellow artists out there, especially photographers, I recommend it highly - I loved her ruminations on being an artist (specifically one that hasn’t made anything for a while) and also on reading and writing itself. There are a whole load of passages that resonated with me, so precise to how I feel with my work at the moment, in what seems to be the tail end of the pandemic when everyone else is beginning to create and put out big projects again.
She writes, “for instance, having an idea for a picture, but eventually feeling a kind of inertia about the whole thing, and after some time and effort, chalking it up to a failure” and later says “my production of photographs has dwindled to a trickle, that I’ve grown melancholic and ambivalent about photography”.
I nodded as I read those lines, having pretty much made nothing over the last year. I had ideas yet never followed through with them, mostly as life itself has got in the way and I’ve found it almost impossible to render my grief and depression into something creative. My love for photography is still within me, it’s just more for other people’s work instead of my own right now. I struggle with the ‘making work for the sake of it’ notion, to be putting out new images just to stay somewhat relevant on an algorithm that works against us.
There was also this quote in Index Cards that made me pause. I wondered if the reason I feel so stuck currently is because I haven’t been making work for the sake of it, like I haven’t been keeping my creative cogs in motion so now they feel almost alien to me. It was said by Delphine Seyrig to Chantal Akerman - “You have to make, make, make. You still have the passion. You’re just not an adolescent anymore.”
Autour de Jeanne Dielman (Sami Frey, 1975)
After having the “you have to make, make, make” quote in my head frequently over the last few weeks, I then saw Another Screen had Autour de Jeanne Dielman up.
‘Shot during the making of Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman (1975), Autour de Jeanne Dielman was only edited together in 2013 by Akerman and Agnès Ravez from over 60 hours of footage taken by by Sami Frey, partner of the film's lead actress, Delphine Seyrig, and a rare man among the film's crew.
Autour de is a document of the highly collaborative process that built and fortified a monumental film. It is also an amusing, tender and sometimes tense portrait of two women at work: one an ambitious young filmmaker led by instinct; the other a seasoned feminist actress used to working under more conventional direction.’
I love Chantal Akerman and this is well worth watching, even just for a peek into the process behind such an iconic film.
Angry Women (published 1991)
Something else I’ve been reading recently and found hugely inspirational. I was shown it by a friend months ago but only just got round to finding the PDF online (here) and going through it. There is some incredible writing and visuals in there from a plethora of great artists.
Five film stills -
Thank you for subscribing to the visual mixtapes. Reach out to me via DM at @eolhcsheppard if you’ve any comments on this week’s, I’d love to know any of your opinions on it (good or bad!).
Until next time,
x Chloe
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