Radiant city

First impressions of Berlin, from August 2019.

However you found your way here, welcome! I’m Emily, and I write letters about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our place in it.

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A note from my first trip to the city—autumn, 2019:

I’m remembering the way the light hits Berlin. Something Edward Hopper said about his own paintings (filched from that brilliant Leslie Jamison essay on the street photographs of Garry Winogrand, radiant cities, and splendid strangers) comes to mind: “What I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house.” I find it strange that I barely took any proper photos in Berlin. Just snapshots like these with my phone of fleeting, seemingly throwaway moments, hastily composed—the thing that is memorable about them always outside the frame, never in it. I found myself growing fond of this city as I eased into it, without quite knowing what I liked about it. And I don’t know why it took me this long to visit for the first time, considering the years I was in the UK and a working interest in WWII history. I walked everywhere, found temporary perches in different neighbourhoods—Neukölln, Friedrichshain, Mitte—in hopes that I would see more and understand more, but I think I saw more and understood less. How do you capture a place in a way that goes beyond what looks beautiful, in a city that often disdains conventional beauty? I think I felt incapable of taking photos of the city in an intentional manner because it felt so unknowable. All cities are unknowable in some way, but there are cities that feel more uncontainable than others. It feels like there are the things that almost sort of overly define Berlin, to the point of predictable kitsch; on the other hand, there’s everything that isn’t definable, that feels amorphous and contradictory, so you’re stuck in the between, forever trying to figure it out. Which, I guess, isn’t a bad a place to be. There will always be a new way to look at the same thing.

& Yes, I’m back in Berlin. More snapshots as I find my way around the city and the language. But first, I just wanted to remember my early impressions of it.

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Also, an old letter published from that first trip to Berlin/Germany:

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& My latest:

E.