23 July 2025
Dear Crina,
Thank you for your letter of 19 July in which I experienced my city through your eyes. That opening image of the blue woman with collaged eyes and mouth gave me the shivers. For some reason, despite the physical dissimilarity, I immediately thought of Margaret Thatcher, the Iron Lady.1 Perhaps it was the bouffant hairdo and implacable stare, made more sinister by the addition of stickers. So, when I saw your photograph of Turner’s sketchbook and accompanying description, I put one and one together to make four.
Apart from the wonderful Geoff Dyer quote (about the truths embedded in fantasies and the unreliability of memory), I was particularly struck by your reflections about visiting Tate Modern:
Once you physically interpose yourself between two borders - the real one, which separates you from the physical comfort zone of "home", and the sensory one, which you cross when visiting a museum […] - you inevitably become an active part of a kind of simulation, in which your role changes from exhibit to viewer, dozens, even hundreds of times in the course of a few hours.
Firstly, I hope this Google translation is accurate enough. I’m not sure whether I’ve completely grasped your idea here but I love the notion that, when we travel, we cross a kind of threshold in which we are repeatedly transformed from a (physical) exhibit into a (sensory) viewer. I’m choosing to interpret the museum here as an uncanny space, not unlike a foreign city where we are unfamiliar with the geography, the language or the local customs. As a frequent gallery-goer, I really appreciate the liminality of the white cube, a kind of non-place, seemingly suspended between the real and the imaginary, where I can engage with new realities. I don’t visit galleries and museums to be entertained. I go for the alienation, what Brecht might call the Verfremdungseeffekt.2
This movement across a threshold, from one space to another - sometimes suspended between the two - reminded me of diptychs. In my first letter to you, I included some half frame photographs which I sometimes gather together under the title Fuzzy Borders. I have long been drawn to the practice of placing one image next to another, either accidentally (which is often the case when I use my half frame camera) or more deliberately (as in the remix of your images above). Whilst I was idly surfing the Internet recently, I came across this quotation from one of my favourite photographers:
I think about diptychs, triptychs and polyptychs […] And to say the truth I prefer the diptychs to the triptychs, for democracy. There is a possibility on one side, and another one on the other side. The triptychs instead have a central figure, more authoritative than the others, an absolute image symbol of a hierarchy. The diptych accepts the doubt, it represents the thesis and antithesis to the pre-Socratics philosophers. […] The pages of books are always two, like the butterfly wings.3
— Guido Guidi, interviewed by Claudia Bigongiari4
I love that phrase “The diptych accepts the doubt”. Our letters form a kind of ongoing diptych, don’t you think?
After reading your letter I decided to visit Tate Modern. I have a love/hate relationship with the place. When we first moved to London, the site was still a dilapidated, decommissioned power station. We lived just down the road and would often walk along the river, past the lugubrious structure, speculating on its future. One of us would eventually say, “That would make a great art gallery.” A kind of in-joke. After the new Tate Modern was created, my school developed a very close relationship with the education department. I have experienced some wonderful professional development there, guided by fantastic artists and curators. We’ve hosted PhotoPedagogy workshops there, been given back stage access and taken part in Offprint. However, I increasingly find the building to be a little oppressive, like a vast art supermarket, or multinational corporation.
Anyway, with Tate Modern in my sights, I began walking towards it from London Bridge station. I had my Hasselblad with me and a few rolls of Ilford XP2 film. As usual on my strolls through the city, I stopped to photograph whatever drew my attention.
When I arrived at Tate I decided not to go inside. I’m not sure why but I was in the mood for something unspectacular.5 I was amazed at the warning signs, security cameras and sheer number of injunctions to not do something - climb, skateboard etc. It suddenly seemed to be a fortress, surrounded by prohibitions. I took two pictures of the outside of the building, and moved on, exploring the nearby public spaces instead.
I spent some time in the wonderful Marcus Campbell Art Books, opposite the gallery. I was sorely tempted to buy a signed copy of a Mark Ruwedel book but managed to resist.
The closer I got to the river, with its splendid vistas and assertive buildings, the less I felt inclined to make pictures. In fact my penultimate photograph, before walking all the way to Covent Garden, was of a slightly spectral woman on a hoarding near the railway bridge on Southwark Street, her eyes concealed by stickers and her hands outstretched in seeming supplication. I’d spent the morning looking and not looking, seeing some things and deliberately averting my eyes from others. There’s so much to see in cities it’s often hard to navigate, to avoid being seduced by glossy surfaces. A camera, especially a cumbersome lump of a thing with no light meter, helps me to slow down enough to pay attention.
Yesterday, I visited the new American Photographs display at the V&A. Taking its cue from Walker Evans, the exhibition presents a diverse set of pictures - a combination of the canonical, commercial and domestic - that demonstrate the plurality of image-making in the USA and beyond.6 I was struck by the number of diptychs in the selection, both intentional double images and pairs of curated pictures from larger series. Here are a couple of favourites:
I really enjoy seeing pictures displayed in pairs, even if they are not necessarily designed to be diptychs. I like what happens when my eyes cross the threshold between the two pictures, the friction that is created and the imaginative effort required to attempt to resolve it (at least temporarily, since pictures have a habit of stirring the imagination long after you’ve finished looking at them).
Some diptychs were imaginary, for example Susan Lipper’s Fence immediately suggested Paul Strand’s White Fence, which is not in the show.
In fact, Lipper’s picture, from her fictional road trip series, was intriguingly paired with a text by Frederick Barthelme, an image/text diptych:
In a town called Quantum, Alabama, she was stopped by the Highway Patrol. They ran her tags and asked her if she knew what was happening.
"It's a simple Question," the puffed-up cop said.
"Sit still there will you? It's a simple question and it deserves a direct answer. We just want to know what you know and when you started knowing it.
That's all we want?
I also enjoyed seeing Pablo Ortiz Monasterio’s Huichol portfolio which documents a fantastic example of international bridge-building collaboration:
The caption reads:
This portfolio is the result of Monasterio’s long collaboration with the Huichol people from the Sierra Madre in western Mexico. When Monasterio’s brother, Fernando, designed a bridge to help the Huichol cross an impassable ravine during summer rains, he took inspiration from the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. After Fernando’s death, members of the Huichol community visited New York to commemorate their collaboration. Monasterio’s work highlights photography’s power to bridge divides and foster connections.
After an hour or so of admiring the riches on display in American Photographs, my wife and I walked up Exhibition Road to the Serpentine Gallery to see the excellent Giuseppe Penone show and stand under this year’s temporary pavilion. I love the Koenig bookshop at Serpentine South, which sells new and heavily discounted titles, and managed to pick up a cheapish copy of One and One is Four: The Bauhaus Collages of Josef Albers.
The title is an Albers quote, expanded on the back cover.
One and one is four - that’s art - or if you like it better - life. I think that makes clear: the many-fold seeing, the many-fold reading of the world makes us broader, wider, richer. In education, a single standpoint cannot give a solid firm stand. Thus, let us have different viewpoints, different standpoints.
Near the end of the book, there is another Albers quote describing his ethics of pictorial decorum:
I would say I start from experiences and read … always between polarities - that is between loud and not loud, between young and old, between spring and winter … [I]f I can make black and white behave together instead of shooting at each other only, you see, then I feel proud …
— Josef Albers, 1960
One and one is four. That’s life. Looking forward to your next Experiența Spațiului!
Your photography friend,
Jon
This letter is one of a sequence entitled Experiența Spațiului. Here are links to the others:
Experiența Spațiului - Fuzzy Borders - by Jon Nicholls
Experiența Spațiului - Cadaques - by Crina Prida
Experiența Spațiului - Formidable Encounters - by Jon Nicholls
Experiența Spațiului - Londra - by Crina Prida
These posts will always be free but, if you enjoy reading them, you can support my analogue photography habit by contributing to the film fund. All donations of whatever size are very gratefully received.
Also, more disturbingly, the woman looks a lot like one of my deceased grandmothers.
I often find myself flummoxed by contemporary art exhibitions. It takes me a while to orientate myself, to reject the urge to understand and to begin to interrogate what’s going on. I try not to read the accompanying text (some of which I find unnecessarily verbose and opaque) until I have spent some time looking, thinking and feeling. Occasionally, when I find the work impenetrable, I will seek some curatorial support. I enjoy the challenge of making sense of something that doesn’t give itself up too easily but I also feel uncomfortable whilst doing so.
On the subject of wings, I saw this just outside Tate Modern:
I’m a fan of Georges Perec’s notion of the infra-ordinary
The exhibition begins with an image by Walker Evans of a well-dressed man in Cuba.
Dear Jon, this is a wonderful letter, and I apologize for my late reaction (i've explained the reason earlier). You can't imagine my frustration - having visited London weeks before our virtual encounter here. Let's hope there is a chance to correct that in the not-so-distant future. Your reading references struck a chord, and unlike before, I think my next letter will be linked to yours in a more organic way. Thank you for bringing so much knowledge and information in this correspondence; it makes me exercise more ambition on this side of the "table", and that is another thing I am grateful for. (Yes, I thought of Ms. Thatcher as well when I saw that portrait in Camden).