Corona winter. I walk through Lichtenberg with an analogue Olympus PenD from the 1960s. The half-format of the camera challenges me to think and to keep finding pairs of images that are only separated by a black bar. I play with the edit on the street. The days are short. I spend the long evenings mentally with notes by Erich Fromm.
“A society can be outwardly rich, powerful, and even full of pleasure to man, and that may be the moment when that society faces its destruction. When you see the history of the Roman Empire at the height of its power, I am reminded in many ways of what we can see with us today. And this is not the result of anyone’s bad will or bad intentions or lack of intelligence. These are social processes where the moment for change is missed. And this has been missed by many societies in history. Today the situation is only so tremendously critical because we have nuclear weapons, the world has become unified and catastrophes can lead to tremendous consequences.” (Erich Fromm: Drafts for a Society of Tomorrow, symposium on the occasion of his 75th birthday, May 1975, Locarno)
