Holding the Opposite

A photographic collaboration with Juliette Mansour

“I don’t want to do something already being done. I want it to be interesting and new!”

Those were Juliette’s words when we started talking about a photographic collaboration. Over the past two years, there have been a lot of photographic collaborations on Substack, finding something interesting and new felt like a challenge in itself. But we exchanged ideas and eventually found something that felt exciting and new to both of us. The overarching idea was to photograph subjects inspired by the philosophy of Yin and Yang.

One of us would photograph something that represented Yin, and the other would respond photographically to the image with Yang in mind.

Before we started, I refreshed my memory on the philosophy of Yin and Yang and what both sides stand for, looking for inspiration for what to photograph. I even found a handy list of Yin and Yang attributions online. Looking at that list, I thought to myself, “Well, this is going to be easy.”

Source: https://steemit.com/yin/@gabriel0/attributes-of-yin-and-yang

But it wasn’t that easy. What the philosophy of Yin and Yang teaches us is that although they are opposing forces, they exist in relationship to one another. Balance is not created through sameness, but through interaction and transformation.

No matter what I photographed, there was never only Yin or only Yang to be found. And that’s what I ultimately found most interesting: keeping this philosophy in mind while photographing, or while looking at Juliette’s “replies,” made me sit longer with the images, thinking about them in terms of Yin and Yang.

“Yin-Yang is the idea that there is a duality to everything. But rather than this being some kind of oppositional or destructive conflict between two rivals, the Yin-Yang argues that there is a great harmony to be found in the contrast between things. The symbol does not feature a fully black side set against a fully white side. The white has a bit of black, and the black a bit of white. Contrast, yet harmony.”¹

Although we present the work as diptychs, we invite you to look at the images with this philosophy in mind. You may notice, as we did, that some of them can’t be assigned to one side as easily as others.

We made ten diptychs in total. Here are five of them:

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If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I like to use collaborations as an opportunity to work on my zine- and book-making skills.

When I started thinking about this zine, I recalled Juliette’s hesitation to create „just another set“ of diptychs - something that has been done many times before, especially here on Substack.

The exchange with Juliette about our collaboration and my experience of how Yin and Yang coexist in every image we made pushed me to think about presenting the photographs in a different way than simply placing them side by side on paper.

That’s when I came up with the idea for a booklet containing all the images, but inviting the viewer to interact with them: to study them side by side or individually, lay them out on a table, and perhaps try to find their own pairings.

Here is a video of it:

If you would like to see the other five pairings and read about Juliette’s experience working on this collaboration, check out her newsletter.

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That’s all from me today.

As always, thank you for being here! ❤️

X,

Susanne

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1. https://bigthink.com/mini-philosophy/wisdom-daoism-yin-yang-tattoo/