Conscientious talking about Kawada Kikuchi’s “The Map.”

Here is something else that is striking about The Map. Can you name a German photographer who has dealt with the past in the way Japanese photographers have? Maybe I’m missing something, but while Germany’s non-photographic artists have dealt with the German past, its photographers, curiously enough, for the most part have avoided the subject. This is all the more striking since Germany as a whole has made tremendous efforts to deal with its past – unlike Japan, whose prime ministers until very recently regularly visited a shrine honouring war criminals, but refused to even apologize for the country’s action during World War II.

Gotta give credit where credit is due, this is a lucid paragraph, perhaps the only one Colberg has ever written.

The post also features the following stomach-churning passage: “…when pressed, I elaborated on why The Map truly is a stellar book. Just as before, I was surprised about the stuff I heard myself say, and pleasantly so, if I may add. Son of a gun, I thought, that’s actually kind of interesting.“

Sigh. The most respected “online photo critic” (he still is, right? i’m not really that close to the ‘scene’) is a man who would happily find the words to praise the color and texture of his own vomit.