The Beam of Light Enters The Darkness, 1938, Roman Vishniac (1897 - 1990)

We can neither escape personal responsibility by imagining that our dependence upon others determines how we are to act, nor escape this dependence upon others by imagining that our freedom enables us to shape our future inalienably. Instead, and this, for Merleau-Ponty, is the ‘modern form of humanism’, we have to accept that there is an inescapable ‘ambiguity’ in human life, whereby we have to accept responsibility for our actions even though the significance of everything we try to do is dependent upon the meaning others give to it.

Thomas Baldwin, from the introduction to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s The World of Perception

Encyclopedia Britannica, Flowers at Work, 1956

László Moholy-Nagy

Segments, 1921

We will sometimes fail to produce what we should, or to write or speak articulately enough, to be “right,” to be thoughtful or expansive enough, to consider the whole range of historical circumstance, to be responsible at our work’s distribution—but our failure is part of the collective project. We brave our errors in thought for the possibility that to see that their demonstration will allow others to get toward rightness. We brave the humility to learn from fair criticism, and also learn that usefully distanced shrug at the inevitable appearance of the jealous or maligning kind. We brave clumsy writing or speaking, that even in a crude form, a necessary idea will emerge as material for others to refine. When we are silent, we learn it makes room for others to speak. It’s not just our errors we become brave about, but our projects’—and our own—incompleteness. You can stop fearing death, too, if you begin to think of the collective project of being alive in the common world, that one’s own end and the end to one’s work and one’s love is not the end of what is right or good. What needs to go on will.

— Anne Boyer, Tender Theory

Ergy Landau

Ylla (Camilla Koffler, Hungarian photographer)

Paris c. 1933