Dear K,
Last week I went to the Des Moines Art Center, which is our humble little art museum here. It's got a couple of treasures and they do their damndest in a town that has little time for anything other than cubicle sitting and couch sitting. The new exhibit the art center has on display is photographs by Vivian Meier. There are exhibits of her photographs all over the country now, she's been in vogue for the last couple of years. They made a Netflix documentary about why.
You see these two yahoos in New Jersey went and bid on a storage unit in an auction and they won. In the storage unit were thousands and thousands of negatives. Some of them were dated and had the location on them. A lot didn't. Vivian Meier had died some time ago and never intended for this work to be exhibited or used or thought about. I believe that she took these pictures for herself. Took them and made them and kept them secret like you keep your writing secret. Now the secret is out though.
It's a strange exhibit to see, because there's no authorship in the work, by that I mean you don't know how or why she took these pictures. A lot of the ones up at the Des Moines Art Center are in the genre of Street Photography, which is where you take pictures of strangers on the street. Vivian Meier took pictures of strangers without them knowing, she didn't do street portraits. She didn't ask people about their lives. She just took little snippets of their lives, parts of their exteriority and hid them away. It's kind of the inverse of what happened to her work isn't it?
Here's the thing though. I guarantee that your work will resonate with somebody. I guarantee that what you write will save somebody's life in a small way. I say this because I think that we live and die in small events. Every minute is made up of sixty seconds and those sixty seconds are made up of smaller bits and smaller than these is where we live. They're not all good, and not all bad, and it's the whole that matters, it's in aggregate. I want you to share your work for the same reason that if we were all put into a choir we should all sing. It's the duty of everybody who can move a pen and put together a sentence to write to the best of their ability, and to share it. To sing with the choir.
I'm not going to stop trying to convince you to that your work should be made public. And I won't have any part of destroying it after you die. You know what I'll do? I'll edit it all into books and publish them myself. That's what I'm going to do. You better hope you outlive me because if you don't I'm gonna find all your writing and share your voice with the world.
Yours In Annoying Friendship,
K
Friday, January 20, 2017
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