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 * A Narrow Foothold
 * Book
 * About
 * Conversation




A NARROW FOOTHOLD


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German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s monumental work the Arcades Project—which
remained unfinished at the time of his death in 1940—represents both a treatise
on the labyrinthine nature of the modern city and the realization of his dream
of a book without authorship, composed almost entirely of quotations drawn from
a wide range of sources. Taking their mutual appreciation for these aspects of
Benjamin’s work as their starting point, friends and photographers Jonas Feige
(Germany) and Alan Huck (United States) sorted through their archives of
orphaned images in order to assemble a collective portrait of an anonymous
city—one composed of severe geometric forms, vague symbols, and the spectral
traces of a human presence. Intentionally trying to dissolve any sense of
individual authorship, the two looked to Benjamin as their methodological guide,
reminding them that “an enigma is a fragment that, together with another,
matching fragment, makes up a whole.”

A Narrow Foothold was published by Another Earth in 2024.

Edited by Jonas Feige, Alan Huck, and Cristian Ordóñez. Designed by Cristian
Ordóñez. Typography by Erkin Karamemet. Printed by The Gas Company.

The initial run of 100 copies has sold out, but the artists and publisher have
chosen to offer a free PDF of the book as a download. A conversation between
Jonas Feige and Alan Huck on photography, process and collaboration can be found
further down this page.

Download PDF
A CONVERSATION
JONAS FEIGE AND ALAN HUCK

J
J

Maybe the best way to start this is to ask the most obvious question: Why
collaborate?

A
A

Well I think we’ve been “collaborating” in a sense for quite a long time—it just
happens to be manifesting in a more explicit way now that we’re sharing
authorship of this joint publication. So much of our friendship has been
centered on mutual interests in art and literature and we’ve spent many years
feeding things back and forth to each other—quotations and excerpts from our
readings, photographic works we feel the other person might appreciate, various
bits of wisdom and encouragement—as well as offering important feedback on
whatever it is we’re in the process of making. We’ve essentially been working
together on our separate endeavors, so it seems only natural that those
endeavors should eventually coalesce into a shared one. In this specific case,
the impetus for that was more from you deciding to let me in on something you
had been developing rather than us building something from scratch, so maybe
there’s something you could say about that decision to give up some of your
autonomy.

J
J

I was feeling frustrated with this large pile of photographs that I had
accumulated over the years that did not fit into any of my projects (an idea
that I believe in less and less these days). For the longest time, I simply
could not figure out what to do with these pictures and every attempt I made at
an aesthetic or theoretical concept felt like I was taking undeserved shortcuts.
I think a lot of photographers/artists are familiar with this, a certain kind of
loneliness and the perceived pressure to figure out what our work is about. I
was looking for a way to alleviate that somehow, to get away from my own ego and
to find a more communal way of making work. I realized that maybe the solution
for my particular problem might not come from inside my head, but from outside
it (to borrow a phrase from John Cage). And that’s when I approached you.

I had admired an appreciation of the unfinished in your work and thinking, a
championing of process over outcome which, along with what you said about our
back and forth over the years, made me feel like you would be the right person
to ask. You also introduced the idea of the fragment into our discussions, which
arguably has informed our book more than any other. Can you say what it is that
continues to draw you to the fragmentary?


A
A

I think you already nailed it to some extent with the phrase “process over
outcome.” Of course there is something satisfying about the finality of
something, all the loose ends tied up in a neat little package, but at the same
time I struggle to reconcile that sense of completion with wanting to retain
something of the process itself, to foreground that aspect in some way. Another
friend of mine once said to me how it always seems like I’m working through
something rather than on it, which I very much appreciated, because it’s that
taking of a subject or a preoccupation, rolling it around for a while and just
seeing what clings to it, how it mutates and transforms, that really fulfills
me. The result, the end product, is always bound to be something of a
disappointment. There’s this wonderful Lydia Davis essay (“Fragmentary or
Unfinished”) where she talks about how the fragmentary calls attention to the
work “as artifact” rather than whatever it might mean—a breaking of the fourth
wall. I feel like there’s something in that that relates to your concern (which
I very much share) about the pressure to force a set of pictures into a
conceptual framework, when the real desire, that we tend to suppress for any
number of reasons, is to somehow ground it in the messy activity of its making. 

Coming back to our book though: the particular notion of the fragmentary that we
tried to play off of comes from Walter Benjamin, specifically his monumental
(and ultimately unfinished) work the Arcades Project. Perhaps you could say
something about your interest in that book (or Benjamin in general) and what
relevance it has for our collaboration.


J
J

I guess in many ways Benjamin could be considered the patron saint of “working
through” something! He has touched on so many subjects in his writing, but
always from an unusual and unexpected angle. It was his thinking around the
ideas of history and progress that initially got me interested and that had a
profound effect on some of my other work.

The Arcades Project is a strange book and much has been written about it. There
are some apparent parallels between its motifs and our endeavor—the flâneur, the
city, the labyrinth. But it is the way it is assembled, the method of its
making, that really fascinated me. Instead of offering up one grand theory,
Benjamin sets fragment against fragment, letting the montage of the material
speak for itself. As he himself states at one point in the Arcades: “Method of
this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall
appropriate no ingenious formulations, purloin no valuables. But the rags, the
refuse—these I will not describe but put on display.”

Benjamin’s larger goal with the Arcades Project was to find a new way of making
sense of history—specifically that of the 19th century, by way of a portrait of
the city of Paris. But instead of telling that history, he wanted to show it and
to allow the re-assembling of historical waste, the rags as he called them, to
produce new and unexpected insights.

I have always been fascinated by this method and wondered if it could be
translated to the photographer’s archive as the site of another type of history.
Seen that way, our collaboration became a sort of collective rag picking;
rummaging through our combined collections of unused and discarded photographs
in the hope that their re-assembling could produce something new that had been
hidden until then. It was also an attempt at redeeming these photographs, as
Benjamin would probably have said, and saving them from falling into oblivion.

Something I have always wondered about with the Arcades Project is, if Benjamin
had finished it, how much would he really have “just shown” and how much of his
own voice would have remained or snuck back in.
During our time working on this
book, similar questions arose a number of times: how much can we actually let
the material do the talking and when, as the authors of the book, do we have to
take charge and steer it in a certain direction? I think it is the pursuit and
creation of meaning I am wondering about, questions I know you have you have
also grappled with before.

A
A

Throughout so many different areas of thought the consensus regarding human
happiness seems to be that it requires some measure of relinquishing the
will—the capacity to get out of your own way. It’s an immense struggle, of
course, especially when it comes to making any kind of art. As you know, the
compositional methods and overarching philosophy of John Cage are very much
predicated on this idea, of giving one’s agency over to chance—creating a space
or the conditions for things to occur freely and spontaneously rather than
forcing the material to conform to your own ideas and concepts. This feels very
much like Benjamin’s “I needn’t say anything. Merely show.” With both Benjamin
and Cage, there is still the formulation of a structure or a set of parameters,
but at the same time the strategy is intended to do away with all the commentary
and allow the things—sounds, language, pictures—to speak for themselves. 

Photography’s place in this whole discussion is an interesting one because we
are dealing so directly with the material of the real world, so that negotiation
between one’s ideas and (referring back to the line of Cage you mentioned)
“ideas outside the mind” is so pressing and unavoidable. I think maybe one of
the most valuable aspects about working together on this book was that we
weren’t able to insist too strongly on our own ideas about things, if only
because we’re just not that obstinate of people and we respect each other a
great deal. 

As for “the creation and pursuit of meaning,” I feel like I’m increasingly
unsure as to the right way to go about that pursuit or, even more importantly,
how I would define or understand meaning for myself. (I’m reminded of Joseph
Brodsky here: “In the business of writing what one accumulates is not expertise
but uncertainties. Which is but another name for craft.”) A novel crammed full
of allusions and symbolism means very differently from, say, the “merely show”
method of haiku, and I want to believe that things can “mean” on their own
accord, through their sheer presence, without my heavy-handed intervention. I
know Cage’s 4’33 piece strikes many people as a kind of novelty, but I find it
very instructive, again just being indicative of this wonderful balance between
structure and spontaneity. There’s a big difference between forcing things into
a container of one’s own invention and simply putting a frame around what’s
there, which is of course what we do as photographers in the so-called
documentary mode. Maybe it’s just a matter of extending that principle to the
larger “frame” of the project or the body of work, not only individual images.


J
J

Yes, and maybe also to the two stages of working on a photo project such as
ours: the actual taking of the photographs (I’m thinking specifically of Zen in
the Art of Archery here and the idea of emptying the mind), and then working
with the images later on.
Something that has become especially apparent to me with our collaboration is
how completely different these two acts are. It probably should not have been
that much of a surprise, as every photography student is told over and over
again how important it is to detach yourself from your own photographs, but
still: I have come away with a new appreciation for editing and sequencing, if
only because we essentially skipped the first part for A Narrow Foothold and
were able to almost look at our combined photographs as if they had been taken
by someone else entirely.
I remember reading somewhere that whenever Francis Ford Coppola worked on a new
film, he would lock away the footage he had shot for many months and only
attempt to start editing after he had forgotten what the actual experience of
filming that footage was like. It is arguably a lot easier to get out of your
own way (and quiet the photographer or filmmaker’s ego) when you’re working with
material that has been sitting on the shelves for a long time and to which you
have lost almost all attachment. Curiously, if we did become attached to a
particular photograph during the editing of the book, it was always one of the
other’s and not our own!

I love Brodsky’s definition of craft as not accumulating expertise but
uncertainties and it has my mind drifting in a million different directions. You
and I have spoken about Zen Buddhism a number of times (something that was of
course also very important to John Cage) and the concept of the beginner’s
mind—this idea that those who consider themselves masters or experts close
themselves off from a world of experience and that one should instead embrace
compassion and continuous learning. “The real secret of the arts: always be a
beginner.” (Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind)

Tim Ingold called this the original idea of the word amateur: those who do
things not to master them, but for the love of doing them. This might also be
the flip side of what you said earlier about finding meaning: that if you only
do the work, meaning will come of its own accord. I am also thinking of Simone
Weil here, and her conception of attention as a kind of vigilant waiting. Her
idea of attention has implications far beyond our scope here, but I still find
it informative for the creative process: “If we concentrate our attention on
trying to solve a problem of geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no
nearer to doing so than at the beginning, we have nevertheless been making
progress each minute of that hour in another more mysterious dimension. Without
knowing or feeling it, this apparent barren effort has brought more light into
the soul.”

Another more mysterious dimension!

I’ll close off this meandering reply by saying that attention seems to also be
at the heart of a lot of the photography that moves me personally. It allows me
to share in the photographer’s attention to the world and through it, I feel the
photographer asking me a simple question: Do you see what I see?

A
A

To your first remark about photography’s “two stages” (which I suspect we could
probably divide up or multiply even further) I immediately thought of one of
Corita Kent’s class rules: “Don't try to create and analyze at the same time.
They're different processes.” Rather than viewing photographic practice as a
process, it seems to me more like a long chain of very different processes all
linked together, and it never ceases to surprise me how each of those segments,
particularly all that comes after the actual picture making, requires a very
different set of faculties and way of orienting oneself. 

Whenever I teach undergraduate students about editing, sequencing, etc., we
always do an exercise working with found images (often film stills) because of
how it completely cuts off all the emotional energy that would otherwise be
bound up in the initial making. There’s for sure a freedom and a clarity that
comes with that which can be really instructive. And here the importance of
detachment comes up yet again. It seems we are constantly doing this strange
back-and-forth—trying to untether ourselves from our preconceptions when we set
out to make pictures, then again when we need to see our own resulting images
clearly, all the while trying to go deeper inward. No wonder it’s all so messy
and confusing, requiring long stretches of time to let things settle. 

Speaking of beginner’s mind, I have been teaching a foundations photography
class here (whereas I have become somewhat accustomed to mid-level courses and
workshops with folks who maybe have more experience with the medium) and it has
been so refreshing to be focusing exclusively on the fundamentals again. I was
showing some of Paul Graham’s projects from the 2000s recently (A Shimmer of
Possibility, The Present) which feel very much like an exercise in “beginner’s
mind,” a photographer well into his career making work that emphasizes the basic
functions of the camera/medium (time, focus, etc.). Attention definitely comes
up a lot too, as I try to get students to realize the essential power of what
you just described—the fact that a picture allows someone to share in your
seeing, and that the more deeply you “attend,” the more that depth of feeling
and consciousness enters into the pictures and gets transferred over to the
viewer. 

I remember a criticism I received from someone once telling me that my remarks
were always really obvious. It’s probably true, but it’s because it’s usually
the most obvious, the most basic and fundamental aspects of things that I tend
to find the most profound. Photography’s relationship to attention—the attention
it both requires and confers—is very much one of those things.


J
J

Just yesterday I read philosophy being described somewhere as the art of
wondering at the obvious. I wrote this down because it seemed so closely related
to photography but also wonderfully on point and somehow too innocent at the
same time.

When I was at school, I had a teacher who was supposed to educate us in
religious studies. A church-going Christian himself, he would still have none of
it. He felt that teaching religion in the way the German school system intended
would come close to indoctrination. So, instead, he taught us philosophy. He
introduced us to the ancient Greeks, the Stoics, the French existentialists, and
many others. He wanted us to be able to think for ourselves and I am still
immensely grateful for this early introduction to philosophy and critical
thinking.

I don’t think he would have agreed with the above definition of philosophy. He
was much more indebted to the dialectical method and might have rather said that
philosophy is the art of problematizing the obvious. His way of analyzing was
one of scrutinizing the object in a back and forth until he arrived at some sort
of satisfactory truth. And while he was very passionate about philosophy, he
made it very clear that he saw the real value in something else, namely art. In
his eyes, no philosopher ever came close to achieving what our greatest artists
have achieved. I don’t remember the exact context, but there was a moment when
he said to me that “all philosophers are failed artists.” He said it with such
conviction that I did not dare to ask what exactly he meant. Today I believe the
answer might have something to do with the difference between those two words,
wondering and problematizing, and that he made this strong judgment because
really, he was speaking of himself—that maybe he would have liked to
problematize less and wonder more. As someone who is likewise always going back
and forth between the spirit and the intellect, this feels very familiar.
Although I would probably not pitch artist against philosopher, but rather treat
these as two points on the spectrum of, well, attending to the world.

Let me make another leap here. I’ve been thinking about dichotomies and
paradoxes for a while. I have found that this philosophical method of
constructing paradoxes and dichotomies, or thesis and anti-thesis, can be both a
blessing and a curse. It can be tremendously helpful to get to the bottom of
things but it can also trap you within a cage constructed by language. I think
it was Niklas Luhman who said that it is one of language’s particularities that
every statement refers to its own counter-statement—that every affirmation
correlates to its negation and that whatever you say, you will invite someone to
say the opposite.

In a book which I think you had recommended to me, the poet Emily Ogden speaks
of her own trouble with the question whether poetry matters or not. “If I say
poetry does matter … I have implicitly conceded that there could be two views of
the case.” Her saying that poetry matters would invite someone else to say that
it doesn’t. Ogden’s way out of this is to keep the question from arising in the
first place. And she proposes to do so by making a gesture—that gesture being
the celebration of poetry itself.

This might sound a little contrived, so let me bring it back to the world of
photography. There’s a Magnum video course by Alec Soth in which he very openly
shares how even he is sometimes plagued by doubts about his work and about being
a photographer. He goes on to tell how he once asked William Eggleston’s son if
his father ever had any such doubts, to which the answer simply was: no, never.

I find that both endearing and interesting. Maybe what it means is that some of
us simply have more doubts than others and that some of us have to try a little
harder to keep those questions from arising. And that the best thing to do in
that case might simply be to go out and photograph or make some art with
whatever means you have. I guess it’s another way of saying that you should
always try to be a beginner.

A
A

This distinction between problematizing (which also presumes solving) and
wondering has me thinking about Ludwig Wittgenstein and the difficulty that his
executors faced in figuring out to do with the massive amount of written
material (his Nachlass) he left behind. There have been many efforts to try and
clean up his work and shape it into a more coherent set of ideas, but there’s
also the feeling that he never really intended his work to amount to a unified
system, and was instead simply trying to provoke his readers into questioning
themselves, to show himself working through the problems (thinking on the page)
instead of necessarily arriving at any definite conclusions. “Our disease is one
of wanting to explain. Man has to awaken to wonder,” he said. 

The poet Mary Ruefle also said something in an interview along the lines of “I’d
always rather wonder than know.” Some might see this as an easy way out, more
like remaining in ignorance than going through the trouble of finding out the
truth, but it’s also much more discomforting because it requires one to live
with ambiguities. But that’s the space of the artist, to develop and nurture
one’s “negative capabilities.” I don’t think that necessarily means never
discovering anything certain, but it’s not the supposed stability of
philosophical truths or logic or science. It comes only in flashes. I think it
was Aristotle who said that “philosophy begins in wonder.” In any case I think
art and photography certainly do, and maybe those who practice it are just more
careful about preserving it, of striving to remain always (like you said) a
beginner.


strategic embellishment 23
intended to endure in quasi-perpetuity 24
a land full of inconspicuous places 84
reveals its brittleness 24
world of particular secret affinities 827
from which dreams arise 84
boredom and dust 838
a sort of productive disorder 211
a form of practical memory 205
up before the sun itself 104
to interrupt the course of the world 318
a thousand configurations of life 5
an endless series of facts congealed 14
in the form of things 14
the monotonous, fascinating, constantly unrolling band of asphalt 519
that ancient dream of humanity 429
always identical and always new 546
to reckon with the open air 392
to put things under a spell 852
so that all at once 852
the fundamental coordinates of this world 843
offer a narrow foothold 460
The text fragments above are excerpted from Walter Benjamin, The Arcades
Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999)
A Narrow Foothold

A website by Jonas Feige, Alan Huck and Cristian Ordóñez
Typography by Erkin Karamemet
A Narrow Foothold was originally published by Another Earth

© 2024