Hello,
earlier this month, I opened my solo exhibition titled Ministry of Small Pleasures. For weeks, I was gathering various little joys from my friends, to display on gallery walls alongside my photographs capturing private pleasures. Many of the small pleasures shared by my friends resonated with me. Romanticising strangers' lives was one of them.
I have always found strangers infinitely intriguing. At the age of 8, long before I professionalized my interest and made strangers a recurring theme in my work, I secretly peeked into my mother’s colleagues' drawers in the teachers' room. I saw these drawers as secret tiny worlds, and I loved examining their content and pondering what it could reveal about a person.
For this Soft Boiled letter, I have compiled a collage of encounters with strangers – my own stories alongside those I came across throughout the last years in books and artworks – allowing something to reveal itself between the lines.
I hope you’ll enjoy,
Katarina
On strangers
How much do we (want to) know about others? The distance between us and another person can take years or minutes to cross. Throughout our lives, we invariably wander these distances, tripping over first impressions and navigating paths in the maze of everyday life where anticipation alternates with indifference. Exchanging curious looks on a bus, glimpsing a face we forget the second we get off. Small talk leading to an unanticipated late-night kiss in a bar – here and gone. A shop assistant we have been seeing for years, yet still know as little as their name. A stranger is like an onion we might muster the courage to peel, or a blank canvas we continuously fill with our imagination.
All the faces our eyes glide through and forget instantly: how many there are in a lifetime? “All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life—where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.” wrote Miranda July in her book It Chooses You. How do others make it through life? Does understanding strangers help us to get a better grip on our own existence? And to what extent can we get to know a person without directly speaking to them?
Wandering the streets of Paris in 1983, the artist Sophie Calle stumbled upon an address book. After photocopying its contents and returning it to the owner, a man named Pierre D., Calle embarked on a quirky adventure. Like developing a negative image on a film camera, she decided to 'expose' the image of the stranger, bit by bit, through encounters with the people whose contacts he kept in the notebook. She later published a book containing interviews with these individuals, creating an indirect portrait—a mosaic of an intriguing personality assembled through those closest to him.
But even before The Address Book, in 1981, Calle created a different book titled Hotel. She took on a job as a hotel maid in Venice intending to gather intimate material about the guests. She meticulously opened wallets, read diary entries and unsent postcards. In a methodical manner, she photographed the content of anything she came across while cleaning the rooms: closets, suitcases, rubbish bins, and toiletries in the bathroom. She stealthily traversed through the corridors, secretly listening to arguments and love-making. Calle wasn’t searching for anything extraordinary, except, perhaps, to silently pose the same question as Miranda July: How do other people make it through life?
While working on her book, It Chooses You, Miranda July researched the L.A. newspaper Pennysaver for ads and visited people who offered things on sale. However, she wasn’t primarily interested in purchasing the advertised items; rather, she was intrigued by the opportunity to delve into the private worlds of their owners.
Women always wonder about other lives, most men are too ambitious to understand this, I read in John Berger’s book on a May morning.
*
For many years, I have found specific joy in observing people enjoying themselves in public spaces: strangers eating, reading, basking in the sun. People do act differently when they spend time on their own, when they don’t compromise their time and their needs.
As the afternoon sun filters through the bus window and my gaze shifts from the road behind to the interior, a man nearby captures my attention. The bus is packed, and he’s among the standing passengers. He holds onto the bus bar, though ‘holding’ might be an overstatement – his hand barely grazes the bar, as if he wasn’t willing to get a steady grip on reality. The way he takes up space makes him stand out subtly.
On that dreary March afternoon when the spring fatigue hits everyone on board – dragging their bodies from work, ready to collapse onto their sofa – he carries the day on his shoulders with grace. His posture is upright, his head tilted at an elegant angle. In his left hand, he holds a briefcase, and a small wool scarf is neatly tucked into the collar of his coat. His figure is slender and petite, his hair is dark, with a thread of silver woven here and there. He has the air of someone whose inner world is wide and calm enough to provide him both excitement and solace. I observe him, intrigued by his expression, as though he's listening to some sophisticated music—perhaps Philip Glass—though he wears no earphones. His eyes are closed, yet there's no hint of exhaustion weighing down his eyelids. It's as if his gaze is turned inward, connecting to something higher, something hidden—a private source of contemplation.
If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes, said Agnes Varda.
What kind of landscape would the man turn into?
*
While sipping coffee and writing at a bookstore cafe in my city, I notice a girl with her mother entering and sitting next to me. After a while, the woman gets up to browse books. The girl can be around seven or eight, her blond hair is braided into a ponytail. She wears glasses and a lavender hoodie, my favorite when I was her age.
For a moment I pause from typing and glance sideways to catch a glimpse of the girl’s drawing in her sketchbook. She diligently scribbles with colored, scented markers. The air fills with the comforting, cartoon-like puff of innocent apple and strawberry scent.
Engrossed in her activity, she seems as though she’s on the most important mission imaginable. Sensing my gaze, she turns towards me with a look that teeters between curiosity and disapproval of the uninvited observation. On the left page of her sketchbook, she has just finished a drawing: it’s the word L O V E, each letter colored in vibrant hues of red, blue, yellow and green.
It’s a hot and humid July Saturday in New York, and I find myself sitting next to an apartment building in Harlem. On the sidewalk beside lies a black cloth on which I arranged various sea shells. In the center stands a sign reading “SHELLS FOR STORIES. TELL ME A STORY AND PICK THE SHELL YOU LIKE.” In the late afternoon, the sky darkens, announcing a big storm. When it starts to rain, it seems as though the sky tore up its belly on the skyscrapers and poured its guts onto the city. The African-American man who passed by with his daughter who wanted to share a story with me, helps me to gather shells and other things into my backpack and offers me to take shelter in their house, as he happens to be the superintendent. Let’s go in! I’m the super! he exclaims, as his daughter and I follow him into the building, running. Like a superhero, the guy pushes the glossy black door and I find myself inside an entrance hall tiled in white marble.
The man brings me a chair and leaves his daughter with me. We observe him running around with a large cluster of keys. He’s on a mission: the roof is leaking and he got to fix the damaged ceiling of one of the top-floor apartments. The neighbors just bought a new sofa! It’s all wet! He laments.
We sit quietly, his daughter and I, and I take out lunch from my backpack. As I begin to eat, the little girl overcomes her shyness and starts to speak. Just as the rain outside the door, sentences pour forth from her in a torrent, words trickle down the floor like glass beads. She’s chatting excitedly about her brother, teddy bears, her dad who forces her to clean her room, and other issues important to a seven-year-old.
She doesn’t shut her mouth, while I’m stuffing mine with a cream-cheese-and-salmon bagel. I eat and listen to her stories. She tells me how she changed schools and found out her new friends were leaking private things she confided in them. She tells me about a strategy she now uses to test the trust of new friends. She fabricates a 'fake secret' about herself and confides it in a friend whose trustworthiness is in question. Then, she waits a couple of days to observe whether the secret remains with the friend or if it bounces back to her.
Is trust the main currency that shortens the distance between us?
In a different year, I stroll through downtown Manhattan, looking for a specific bookshop. Blinded by the bright winter sunlight reflecting off the towering glass buildings, I end up entering the wrong door. To my surprise, I find myself in a clothing store. I look around and browse the expensive items. Before I leave, the enthusiastic shop manager invites me on a date. We agree to meet the following weekend. He awaits me in a Starbucks, and as I approach him, I notice he’s acting strangely. His bewildered look and anxious body language unsettle me as he walks along me a few blocks. We are heading to have dinner somewhere, but he abruptly stops in the middle of the street and blurts out: Let’s cancel. I gotta go! He twists on his foot, and I watch him hastily walking away. I stand, flabbergasted, as the dense crowd continues to flow around me on the sidewalk.
*
We meet a stranger and stumble on each other’s worlds. Each time, a new universe is born with a bang or a whisper, the shared world between us and the other person, and it can go well or very wrong, and “that’s part of the risk thing. Literally anything is possible in the moment.”, as Miranda July says.