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Some Thoughts on Relationships (Enneagram V)

Le Lit, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. 1893.

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“In my experience there are two things we have in common:
we all want to belong, and we all want our lives to have meaning.
But finding belonging and meaning are dependent on our ability 
to build and maintain relationships ___ with people who are like us,
and often with those who are not.”
The Path Between Us

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Suzanne Stabile June 24, 2025

It is my hope in writing this article that readers will find time to reflect on at least some of the ideas I’m sharing from my life experience to date.  I want to spark conversations with this contribution to Tetragrammaton for there are some things we just need to talk about.  It doesn’t matter where, how, or who with, but I’m pretty sure we all need to start talking in earnest about relationships.

At seventy-four, I’m old enough to begin looking back and evaluating the many seasons of my life.  Because I “came of age” in the 1960’s, my life has been partially defined by:

The Viet Nam War
The Civil Rights Movement
The Women’s Movement
Hippies, Mini Skirts, Love Beads and Woodstock
The Assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

For several months, I’ve been perusing my old journals and thinking about how these experiences affected my life in what I now understand to be both positive and negative ways.  It seems important to note that the events of the 1960’s were, in many ways, unexpected and unprecedented.  And yet, what we experienced, and the way we responded to our new reality, never included the kind of polarization we are experiencing now.  

Despite the suggestion that in our modern age we are constantly “communicating” and “connecting”, I’m convinced that we find ourselves in a Relationship Crisis.  We are polarized in too many parts of our lives and more tribal than we’ve been in my lifetime.  Our standard response to most issues is increasingly dualistic: “I’m right and you’re wrong.” Simply stated, dualistic thinking is by its nature, a question of “either/or”, which choice is the right one and which is not?   

Another way of assessing our choices is possible, if only we embrace a nondualistic approach.  At its most basic level, non-duality is represented by “both/and” thinking.  “My choice is good and so is yours.”  We could go with either one, knowing we made a good decision.”  Of course, there are choices that involve each person’s life experience and perhaps their belief systems. and sacrificing integrity is never necessary.  The key, however, is found in respecting the life experience and integrity of every other person, while allowing room for difference without distance.

I’ve had the privilege of teaching the Enneagram for most of the past four decades.  Serious study of this ancient wisdom has offered me the opportunity to understand why I do what I do, and to a limited degree, why others do what they do. It has afforded me the time, space, and place to explore the basic differences in how we, as individuals, see the world.  

I’ve heard so many times, “We’re all pretty much the same when you get right down to it.”  That is just not true.  Enneagram wisdom teaches us that we all belong to one of nine groups of people, each one defined by how we interpret, make sense of, and respond to information from the universe.  Of course there are unending examples of nuance, and millions of possible choices to be made but at the same time, predictable, habitual, and ultimately mechanical patterns of behavior have served us well since we were children. 

It’s a challenge to change those patterns of behavior.  When talking about personality, willpower is a myth that is fueled by emotion, and it will not help us in addressing our methods for dealing with the world.  We cannot clench our fists and grit our teeth in order to make meaningful changes in our personalities.

Two of the best things you can do to make changes that would enhance your relationships are the practices of self-observation and allowing.

1. Practice observing yourself nonjudgmentally.  It won’t be easy.  But when we judge ourselves, we defend ourselves and then we are deeper in personality than when we started.  Just observe your behavior, gently acknowledge it, and move on.

2. Practice allowing parts of your personality that don’t serve you well to simply fall away.   Try to avoid feeling frustrated or angry, and after you acknowledge the behavior that you are trying to change just let it go.  The result won’t be immediate, but after time you will find that a new way of responding to similar situations will emerge.

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“Every expectation is resentment waiting to happen”

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For deeper thought and conversation:

Choose one of the statements below that you think describes you. Think about it, maybe even journal about it a little and then consider discussing your insights with someone else.  Each of these ways of being in the world can be problematic in relationships.

• Do you take responsibility for making situations better for others?

• Do you believe you can affect the world without being affected by it?

• Are you accustomed to being focused inward, depending on your own strength to get you through.

There is nothing easy about relationships.  There are no short cuts.  They require lots of awareness, energy and hard work.  My best advice on the subject is this:

• Do your personal work and be the healthiest person you can be. 

• Then find someone else who is doing the same.

 I happen to be relational by nature.  I always have been.  But there are two sides to everything, and this “gift” is no exception because relationships are messy and unpredictable.  If I’m not discerning about the people I choose to be in relationships, with I can easily end up committing too much time to too many people, often resulting in taking for granted the people I love the most.

I’ve confessed this many times to my husband, my children, my therapist, my spiritual director, and my pastor.  So I’m sharing it not in search of grace, though that would be nice, but because it is part of a bigger teaching about relationships.  

One of the most valuable things I’ve learned from people who are in the Recovery Community is this: “Every expectation is resentment waiting to happen.”  Expectations are at the core of most of our relationships, whether they have been agreed upon or assumed.  Our failure to talk about them clearly and openly causes harm that could potentially be avoided with honest conversation.  

For deeper thought, journaling or perhaps conversation, consider this quote:

“Inability or unwillingness to appropriately deal with feelings
Is problematic.  When others can’t be honest about what they feel and
what they need, the delayed emotional responses are usually expressed
as anger, shame, fear, or perhaps resentment, all of which are
damaging to a relationship.”¹

What we do is seldom more important than how or why we do it.  I find myself more challenged by the “why” but for others, it can be the  “how.”  Both are, perhaps, determined by personal motivation.  Maybe, like me, you are motivated by a deep desire to be wanted.  My husband Joe’s motivation most of the time is to believe his presence matters.  Our children, in discussion with their spouses, have discovered that within their community of eight, their motivations include: believing their presence matters, avoiding betrayal, knowing they will be taken care of, wanting to be understood, a deep desire to hear that they are good, and being able to trust that they are safe.

For deeper thought, journaling or perhaps conversation:

• If you were asked to name one motivation that you believe is most consistent in your sharing life with others what would it be?

• Would you say that your motivation in relationships is more about connection and belonging, or about being right?  

These ideas are clearly not exhaustive.  In fact, they are a mere beginning of all that I believe we need to talk about concerning relationships.  Our responses to life are determined in part by how we make sense of what we see, and how we decide to respond.  It’s different for all of us.  

What we consider to be strengths in our relationships in our twenties can easily become weaknesses in our thirties and forties and beyond, if we aren’t willing to engage in deep, self-reflective inner work.

I sincerely believe a relationship crisis is at hand.  We can either decide to work toward healthier and more respectful relationships, or we can continue to contribute to the dualistic and polarizing nature of who we are becoming both individually and collectively.

We will always fall short in relationships, challenged to name and work through disappointment.  Even though this is more difficult for some of us than for others, I hope we will all find a way to begin offering and receiving forgiveness.  It’s just part of the deal.

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¹The Path Between Us

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Suzanne Stabile is a speaker, teacher, and internationally recognized Enneagram master teacher who has taught thousands of people over the last thirty years. She is the author of ‘The Path Between Us’, and coauthor, with Ian Morgan Cron, of ‘The Road Back to You’. She is also the creator and host of The Enneagram Journey podcast. Along with her husband, Rev. Joseph Stabile, she is cofounder of Life in the Trinity Ministry, a nonprofit, nondenominational ministry committed to the spiritual growth and formation of adults.

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Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

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'Stalking The Wild Pendulum' Of Vibratory Attunement

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Molly Hankins June 19, 2025

For many spiritual leaders, raising our vibration is synonymous with accessing higher levels of consciousness, but scientist and author Itzhak Bentov explains how this actually works in his book Stalking The Wild Pendulum. Bentov is a fascinating character - a Czech-born national named Tobias with no academic background who immigrated to British-controlled Palestine in the mid-1940s and became a mechanical engineer and inventor, changing his name after joining what would soon become the IDF Science Corp. His inventions range from rocket science components and medical devices to low-carb spaghetti, but his research into the mechanics of consciousness became his most memorable legacy.

Bentov believed that every living being has one material and one nonmaterial organizing system, and that no organized energy is ever lost. Just as our physical body is reabsorbed by the Earthly elements at the time of death, so too is our “organized energy body of information” reabsorbed by the organized information body of the cosmos. According to Bentov, these two systems produce a measurable frequency signal called the electro-static field, a vibration that can be measured by static meters. The strength of this signal depends on the vitality of the subject being measured; a person, plant or animal in poor physical health or depressed spirits will have a weaker signal than a healthy, happy subject. He claims stronger signals entrain vibrating bodies in their proximity. Entrainment occurs when two oscillating systems synchronize their rhythms, meaning a high-frequency electro-static field will raise the vibration of other beings in its field.

Meditative states entrain our physical bodies with the Earth’s vibration, strengthening and stabilizing the signal. As Maharishi Mahesh Yogi said, “If world peace is to be established, peace in the individual must be established first. Transcendental Meditation directly brings peace in the individual life.” Maharishi, who trained as a physicist, began teaching Transcendental Meditation in the 1950s and popularized it at a global scale after teaching The Beatles in the late 1960s. Stalking The Wild Pendulum provides a scientific basis for the idea that in order to bring peace to the world, we have to establish peace within ourselves first. Bentov’s work claims that when we become entrained with the Earth’s vibration, all of our vital functions become attuned to each other, synchronizing at seven cycles per second. 

He gives another example of this phenomena using two grandfather clocks, each wound slightly differently so that the two swinging pendulums are out of sync. The faster moving pendulum, meaning the one with the higher frequency, will entrain the slower one, thereby increasing its speed and bringing the two resonance. In the first sentence of the book’s introduction, Bentov tells us that Stalking The Wild Pendulum is a product of late-night conversations with friends and colleagues calling future scientists to action. Instead of conclusively proving anything to the reader, his work invites us to apply the famous axiom of “as above so below” to draw our own conclusions from the parallels he points to between what he calls micro-realities, such as the behavior of two grandfather clock pendulums, and macro-realities, such as collective human behavior.

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“We change reality as we change our level of consciousness”

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Most of us have our own subjective experiences of interpersonal vibratory attunement. If we’re in a room with someone who is joyful, the mirror neurons in our brains make us feel joyful. The same applies to negative emotions.  However, the logical conclusion from Bentov’s findings is that whoevers electrostatic signal is stronger and higher vibrating will ultimately raise the frequency of the other by being in their presence. Dr. David R. Hawkins created an emotional scale diagram showing specific electrostatic frequencies corresponding with different emotional states. Studies building on his work have since shown that shame has the lowest frequency and authenticity has the highest. 

Our emotional states also correspond with what Bentov refers to as higher or lower consciousness. Higher consciousness, such as authenticity, has a wider range of possible responses to any given stimulus than lower consciousness, such as shame. He writes, “The higher we move along the scale of evolution, the higher the degree of free will, and the higher our ability to control or create our own environment.” It is not until our consciousness has expanded over different lives that we begin to build up our ability to exercise free will. As shared in the beginning of this essay, Bentov believed in both material and non-material organized systems of information energy, both of which evolve over time by way of experience. 

By cultivating a stable, high-vibrating frequency via meditation, expanding our repertoire of personal experience, managing our emotional state and living authentically, we’re able to entrain others in our powerfully positive signal. This is the most important work that can be done on our planet now. Bentov said the terms “levels of consciousness” and “realities” were interchangeable -  we change reality as we change our level of consciousness, and  there is a critical mass element to this as Maharishi also claimed. The magic number, according to many yogic and spiritual traditions, is 144,000 people meditating enough to entrain their own signal with that of Earth, thereby entraining the signals of the rest of the global population. 

Bentov goes a step further. He claims that when beings of higher consciousness focus their attention on beings of lower consciousness, the capabilities of lower consciousness-beings expand. Again, the level of consciousness refers only to how broad the range of possible responses are to any given stimulus - it’s not a value judgment. He writes, “As long as we are just sitting and producing idle thoughts, the thought energy is diffuse, and it eventually spreads out, weakens and disappears. However, when we consciously concentrate and send coherent thoughts, that thought energy or thought form will impinge on the person for whom the thought was meant.” Balancing our work between optimizing the health of our physical and non-physical organized information bodies will give us the energy to stabilize our signal and empower our thought forms to positively impact other beings. 

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Molly Hankins is an Initiate + Reality Hacker serving the Ministry of Quantum Existentialism and Builders of the Adytum.

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Larry Levan Playlist

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Larry Levan was an influential American DJ who defined what modern dance clubs are today. He is most widely renowned for his long-time residency at Paradise Garage, also known as “Gay-Rage”, a former nightclub at 84 King Street in Manhattan, NY.

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On Photography (Excerpt)

Portraits in Life and Death, Peter Hujar. 1976.

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When Susan Sontag released ‘On Photography’ in 1977, itself a collection of essays written in the preceding four years, it announced a new era in thinking about the medium. In the near fifty years since, it has become easy to overlook how radical Sontag’s ideas were for they have been absorbed so readily into the common theoretical understanding of photography we struggle to understand photography outside of her thinking. The book considers photography as a somewhat violent act that fosters a voyeuristic relationship with the world, separate from the reality it purports to capture. Yet the work is not inherently critical of the medium, instead it asks us to consider the power of depiction that the camera gives us, and to weild the tool with respect and compassion.

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Susan Sontag, June 10, 2025

To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King's Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard's gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image. Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. 

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. 

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. 

For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality-photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid-and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker's film, Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectible objects, as they still are when served up in books. 

Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we're shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph-any photograph-seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something "out there," just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. 

While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film-the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity-and ubiquity-of the photographic record is photography's "message," its aggression. 

Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography's glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. 

That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption-the toy of 'the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed-seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art. 

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“It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had.”

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Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing-which means that, like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power. 

Memorializing the achievements of individuals considered as members of families (as well as of other groups) is the earliest popular use of photography. For at least a century, the wedding photograph has been as much a part of the ceremony as the prescribed verbal formulas. Cameras go with family life. According to a sociological study done in France, most households have a camera, but a household with children is twice as likely to have at least one camera as a household in which there are no children. Not to take pictures of one's children, particularly when they are small, is a sign of parental indifference, just as not turning up for one's graduation picture is a gesture of adolescent rebellion. 

Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself-a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness. It hardly matters what activities are photographed so long as photographs get taken and are cherished. Photography becomes a rite of family life just when, in the industrializing countries of Europe and America, the very institution of the family starts undergoing radical surgery. As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life. Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives. A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family-and, often, is all that remains of it. 

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure. Thus, photography develops in tandem with one of the most characteristic of modern activities: tourism. For the first time in history, large numbers of people regularly travel out of their habitual environments for short periods of time. It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had. Photographs document sequences of consumption carried on outside the view of family, friends, neighbors. But dependence on the camera, as the device that makes real what one is experiencing, doesn't fade when people travel more. Taking photographs fills the same need for the cosmopolitans accumulating photograph-trophies of their boat trip up the Albert Nile or their fourteen days in China as it does for lower-middle-class vacationers taking snapshots of the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls. 

A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it-by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on. The method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic-Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they ­ are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures. 

People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad. Everyone who lives in an industrialized society is obliged gradually to give up the past, but in certain countries, such as the United States and Japan, the break with the past has been particularly traumatic. In the early 1970s, the fable of the brash American tourist of the 1950s and 1960s, rich with dollars and Babbittry, was replaced by the mystery of the group minded tourist armed with two cameras, one on each hip. 

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation. One fullpage ad shows a small group of people standing pressed together, peering out of the photograph, all but one looking stunned, excited, upset. The one who wears a different expression holds a camera to his eye; he seems self-possessed, is almost smiling. While the others are passive, clearly alarmed spectators, having a camera has transformed one person into something active, a voyeur: only he has mastered the situation. What do these people see? We don't know. And it doesn't matter. It is an Event: something worth seeing-and therefore worth photographing. The ad copy, white letters across the dark lower third of the photograph like news coming over a teletype machine, consists of just six words: " ... Prague ... Woodstock ... Vietnam ... Sapporo ... Londonderry .. . LEICA." Crushed hopes, youth antics, colonial wars, and winter sports are alike-are equa lized by the camera. Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events. 

A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights-to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on. Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera's interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itselfso that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph. After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed. While real people are out there killing themselves or other real people, the photographer stays behind his or her camera, creating a tiny element of another world: the image-world that bids to outlast us all. 

Photographing is essentially an act of nonintervention. Part of the horror of such memorable coups of contemporary photojournalism as the pictures of a Vietnamese bonze reaching for the gasoline can, of a Bengali guerrilla in the act of ba yoneting a trussed-up collaborator, comes from the awareness of how plausible it has become, in situations where the photographer has the choice between a photograph and a life, to choose the photograph. The person who intervenes cannot record; the person who is recording cannot intervene. Dziga Vertov's great film, Man with a Movie Camera (1'929), gives the ideal image of the photographer as someone in perpetual movement, someone movmg through a panorama of disparate events with such agility and speed that any intervention is out of the question. Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) gives the complementary image: the photographer played by James Stewart has an intensified relation to one event, through his camera, precisely because he has a broken leg and is confined to a wheelchair; being temporarily immobilized prevents him from acting on what he sees, and makes it even more important to take pictures. Even if incompatible with intervention in a physical sense, using a camera is still a form of participation. Although the camera is an observation station, the act of photographing is more than passive observing. Like sexual voyeurism, it is a way of at least tacitly, often explicitly, encouraging whatever is going on to keep on happening. To take a picture is to have an interest in things as they are, in the status quo remaining unchanged (at least for as long as it takes to get a "good" picture), to be in complicity with whatever makes a subject interesting, worth photographing-including, when that is the interest, another person's pain or misfortune.

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Susan Sontag (1933 – 2004) was an American writer, critic, and intellectual, considered one of the most important and brilliant thinkers of her generation. Mostly writing in essay form, through she produced a number of novels and long form works, she explored ideas of art, culture, war, and pain with a singular voice and relentless insight.

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Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”