Dear Adam,

I feel the urge to write you about Glamour and Apathy, in order to stimulate a process of thoughts between us. Only by an exchange of ideas, a good book will arise.
You expressed in our last phone call your fascination - what follows are my words - about the rise and fall of women who, being a model, found themselves during some time in the centre of a world that aspires for the Sublime. Their inescapable fate - similar to a ballet-dancer - is to be excluded , gradually or suddenly, from that world of Glamour with all the consequences that such a process implies.
Your fascination for the theme is psychologically congenial with experiences of the manic-depressive syndrome...glamour and apathy belong to a manic and depressive world of experiences.
I see, however, yet another dimension in your fascination for glamour and apathy that first of all is a visual phenomenon, and therefore fascinates you as visual artist and photographer. This other dimension hides itself behind the interaction of the manic and the depressive tendencies, these forms of time and psychic movements that suppose and oppose each other. This hidden dimension precedes and follows upon the interaction of the manic and depressive moods. It is the fluid that you evoke visually and tangibly in your photo's, more than in your visual art which is conceptually oriented.

Your photo's are an amalgam of atmospheres, a simultaneous presence of different realities. Your pictures stand under the sign of the principle of simultaneity: there is no past, there is no future, only the present in which everything takes place with all its contradictions. The world of experience, from which this consciousness springs from, is that of melancholia. Melancholy is bitter as tobacco and sweet as sugar. As a feeling of life, it is addictive, because it is sensitive to the simultaneous existence of unavoidable oppositions.
The melancholic realises that life is finite and infinite. Samsara and Nirvana are one, according to Nagarjuna, the great Indian metaphysician.
Glamour and Apathy are the border phenomena of Melancholia, extremes of which we do not realise that they exist due to each other. The melancholic does realise this, and tries to visualise within the Glamour the Apathy, and within the Apathy the Glamour, fusing light and dark
Let me know, if you recognise yourself in the picture of the melancholic. If so, then you stand in a respectable tradition. Aristotle wrote interesting texts on melancholia. The ancient Greeks disposed of a remarkable knowledge of the human being, for they had a melancholic and thus an amoral vision on human life. An amoral vision has to precede a moral vision of life, in order to see humans as the embodiment of varying energies and desires. Christianity destroyed that sharp melancholic insight through the introduction of two a priori assumptions: a Sexless God and fallen man, struck by mortal sin. These assumptions, in fact two fantastic lies, created a psychology and ethics with self-destructive tendencies. According to Pierre Klossowski who recently died at a high age, we are still not recovered of the mental shock that Augustine initiated with his vision on Heaven and Earth, or God and Man. Body and mind in Western culture are still two orphans in stead of one child. The ancient Christian ideas and morals continue to affect us, although today under a secularised mask. Many secularists are very like Christians, without realising themselves they are, and do live in half of a world, as do many Christians.
It is up to you to make visible in your photo's how reality is many-layered, and full of energy thanks to its simultaneous and unavoidable oppositions.

All the best,