I've started reading the journal, 'A Woman In Berlin'; a record of life between April 20th and June 22nd 1945 as the Russian army encircled then captured the city. 8 weeks of a life.
Friday, 20 April 1945, 4 P.M.
Rummaging through the few books owned by the tenant of this apartment (where I also found the blank notebook I'm using to write this), I turned up a novel. The setting is English aristocratic, with sentences like: 'She cast a fleeting glance at her untouched meal, then rose and left the table.' Ten lines later I found myself magnetically drawn back to that sentence. I must have read it a dozen times before I caught myself scratching my nails across the print, as if the untouched meal which had just been described in detail was really there and I could physically scrape it out of the book. A sure sign of insanity. Onset of mild delusions brought on by lack of food.
The book was published anonymously in Germany in 1959 then withdrawn after an extremely unfavourable reaction, (she is utterly candid about the difficult choices she made), and only published again after the writer's death, again anonymously, in 2003. (Journalist Marta Hillers has subsequently been identified as the writer.) What impresses me most is that the text has a reassuring precision; she's in complete control of her thoughts and how to express them while life itself spirals out of control. It is fearless writing, at a time of intense fear.
Ineptly useless in comparison, I've been keeping a private online journal for 8 months. I started after coming across a taped up bin bag full of old notebooks I'd kept at other times in my life and found in them a life described that was not quite familiar. Things were different to how I remembered.
The MACK first book Photography award opened for submissions this week and I had been wondering if I should submit a version of this new journal in printed book form, adding casual snapshots from everyday life, such as these apples sitting on a book this weekend - how the Woman in Berlin would have envied me such subject matter.
Being a super niche photo book publisher (conceptual and academic titles) in the very niche world of photo books anyway, I tell myself even if it got to and then past the shortlist I could be fairly sure,but not completely sure, that no-one I know would get to read a word of it.
