Photography with Joe

  What Is Kamibushi Photography? Every age imagines itself unique. Every age is wrong. The Victorians thought they were building civilization. The Romans thought they were preserving order. The twentieth century believed it was marching toward progress, then spent much of its time manufacturing increasingly efficient methods of slaughter. We are no different. Our age, too, is animated by forces larger than itself. Trends emerge from nowhere, moral panics spread like brushfires, politicians surf waves they pretend to command, and entire populations suddenly discover that they have become obsessed with something they scarcely noticed six months before. The Germans gave us a useful word for this phenomenon: Zeitgeist —the spirit of the age. Most people experience the zeitgeist the way fish experience water. They live inside it without seeing it. They absorb its assumptions, repeat its slogans, inherit its anxieties, and call the resulting condition "common sense." Kamibushi Phot...