Can You Look At This?
“Narratives make us understand, photographs do something else: they haunt us” - Susan Sontag
As I was walking through the Bezuidenhout neighborhood in The Hague some days ago, I was reminded that I wanted to write about the fine line between public and private spaces in The Netherlands. More specifically, about the delights and the problematic of street voyeurism.
“The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.”
― Susan Sontag, On Photography
During my unviersity years in Berlin I wrote an essay about voyeurism in war photography, looking closely into the symbolism of a photograph “Confederate Dead behind the Stone Wall at Mary’s Height”. The message of the photographs goes hand in hand with the provocation:
Can you look at this?
Regarding this particular provocation Susan Sontag wrote: “There is the satisfaction at being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching”.
Coming back to the present moment, I always feel a sense of unease and delight when walking down on Dutch streets. The Dutch are famous for leaving their curtains wide open, some connecting this to their history with Calvinism (an emphasis on community and transperancy), some pointing out to their urban planning or a general feeling of trust and safety within society.
In some ways this experience is delightful, multisensory, and inspiring, even if it’s just a sudden glance as we pass by a family having dinner under candlelight, or a couple watching a movie together. However, it can also induce a general feel of guilt and uneasiness even if the quick glance never prolongs into a stare.
In a conversation with a friend I compared the experience of walking down the street in The Hague or Amsterdam to walking through a museum, because the windows serve as displays of art and different objects, symbols and tokens of the ongoing life of the person who made that place a home. The fine line between public and private space is still there, gated by walls and doors, but for a brief moment we become aware of the multitudes of lives that exist among us.
This week’s curation
Art
Sanna Tomac was born in Sweden. She studied drawing and painting at The Florence Academy of Art between 1996-1998. Sanna is presently the Artistic Director and a primary instructor at SARA. Her most recent project was a monumental ceiling painting commission for the Bååtska Palace in Stockholm.
Reading
“Good Parties don’t merely offer us the opportunity to gather with those we love. Rather, more importantly, they teach us how to love. Good Parties foster the virtue of loving well. Good Parties improve, too, our moral vision. They teach us to see ourselves, and one another, differently. We learn to see ourselves as part of a community: one defined not by hierarchy or even shared affinity, in the capitalist-consumer sense, but simply by our love for one another.
Our presence – rather than any of our accidental qualities, our jobs or our family status or even our hobbies – renders us a unified body. Before there is procedural politics, there is the truth of the social life: the fact that we cocreate, through our bonds of love, our sense of us, what formal politics institute.”
Salons
Hosting The Wanderers Series: Good Life and Writing for Expats, a 7-month salon series for people who seek some group support in building a new life in a new home / city / country.
Reading again
I watched Oppenheimer at the cinema, so I had to reread a few chapters from:
When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought
“In this scintillating collection, Holt explores the human mind, the cosmos, and the thinkers who’ve tried to encompass the latter with the former. With his trademark clarity and humor, Holt probes the mysteries of quantum mechanics, the quest for the foundations of mathematics, and the nature of logic and truth.”
I see the Past, Present & Future existing all at once
Before me.
William Blake
Thank you for reading!
Onwards,
Patricia