—on ….’the democracy of universal vulnerability’
‘Rail: I love those contradictions because you don’t think of threatening people as necessarily remorseful; and yet you have these emotions that deny each other, they’re in contention with each other. I think in our own life one of the hardest things to deal with is how our own emotions are often in contention. I feel this and this, it’s not this or that. And I think that raises a whole set of other questions about how well do we even know each other. I think in your photographs there’s this underlying sense that we don’t even know each other. We haven’t even bothered to look at each other. In not looking we’re not thinking. There’s an implicit criticism or critique in the postmodernist sense about the way we inhabit the same spaces.
Rail: In the democratic sense.
Rail: Yeah, I think it’s a really beautiful phrase: the democracy of vulnerability.
Bergman: Danny’s mother was a poet whom I was friends with and I put this quote from her in A Kind of Rapture and I’ll read it to you: “If there’s a theme with which I am particularly concerned it’s the contemporary failure of love. I don’t mean romantic love or sexual passion but, the love which is the specific particular recognition of one human being by another. The response by eye and voice and touch of two solitudes the democracy of universal vulnerability.”’
from the Robert Bergman with John Yau (rail) interview
another fragment to tempt you to read the interview………
which also really speaks really eloquently about the anguish of making ones own work and also wanting it to be seen……eg ‘……So I said, “If you aren’t my audience then who is?” Speaking out of isolation. …’
