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Jesse Freeman

@jesselfreeman

7.3K

followers

3128

following

from Maryland live Kagawa/Tokyo
book reviews | film photography | filmmaking
paper collage | sogetsu ikebana | quiltmaking

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+Ft. Meade, Maryland.
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#leicam3
#film #blackandwhite #50mmsummicron #jchstreetpan400 by @jesselfreeman

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3 days ago

#finishedbooks Afropessimism by Frank B. Wilderson III. Ordered this after seeing it on someone's Instagram back in Baltimore (my bad forgot who). This is one of those in the post-George Floyd wake of publishers actually picking up contemporary black ideas and publishing them. I initially thought of the James Baldwin interview from 1967 when asked if he was either optimistic or pessimistic about the future of America, to which he saw the future of the country and black people insoluble. He responded, "Well I am both glad and sorry you asked me that question...I can't be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I'm forced to be an optimist. I'm forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive. But for the negro in this country...the future is precisely is as bright or as dark as the future of the country itself. It is entirely up to the American people whether or not they are going to face, deal with and embrace these strangers whom they relied on for so long. What white people have to do is try to find out in their own hearts is why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place...because I am not a nigger, I am man. If you think I am a nigger...it means u need, and what they have to do is ask themselves is...why?" Always resonated with me as all my recast experience I have ever had I felt the person needed it for some sad unquestioned …almost unconscious existential anguish. However, Afro pessimism here is described as a lens...an analysis to understand how anti-blackness functioned historically from those in power. The framework was created by Frank B. Wilderson blending critical race theory, philosophy, and personal memoir. It argues that perpetual slavery and anti-Blackness power the structure of the modern world. *continued👇🏾 by @jesselfreeman

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6 days ago

+collage on paper with white out and tape, 2026
"Pre Mortem" 210mm x 297mm.
*Available, link in bio.
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#kolaj #analogcollage #papercollage #blackcollagists #normanlewis by @jesselfreeman

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8 days ago

+Odenton, Maryland.
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#nikonf
#film #blackandwhite #50mm #kodaktrix400 by @jesselfreeman

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12 days ago

#finishedbooks Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Picked this up at the free bookstore in Baltimore. I had a Penguin edition gifted to me by another teacher at GEOS a long time ago when I first moved to Japan. I misplaced it and figured it would come back around and it did with this free copy here. This is an unabridged version which shocked me as it is under a 100 pages...I mean how lazy can one be to what edit it down to 50? Anyway this is the original 150 A.D. self help book. Kind of a funny thing in itself as people never know how to classify it. But with it number/ordering it is a stoic version of those "Life's Little Instruction Book" that was on top of every toilet in lower middle class bathroom in the 90s. I really don't like these types of books. Guess the bulletin points and constant imperative give some folks their life lessons, but I learn more from good fiction especially compared to any contemporary self help books. Glad I read this to see the genre at its genesis. Reading it though I couldn't help but feel Rudyard Kipling did it much more effectively with "If." #bookstagram taken in 父母ヶ浜 by @jesselfreeman

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14 days ago

+the other time's ikebana

#ikebana #sogetsu #sogestuikebana #japaneseflowerarrangement #blackikebanaartist by @jesselfreeman

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16 days ago

+Awashima, Kagawa.
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#ricohgr1s #kodak #kodakportra160
#35mm #colorfilm by @jesselfreeman

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18 days ago

#finishedbooks We Do Not Part by Han Kang. Picked this up from the free bookstore in Baltimore. I read her first novel, "The Vegetarian", roughly ten years ago. Remember liking Kang's writing more than the other famous contemporary novel at the time "I'll Be Right There" by Kyung-sook Shin and way more than Min Jin Lee's sensationalized "Pachinko." At the time I was more into post war Korean writers like Choi In-Hun, Park Wan-Suh, Lee Ki-ho and Jqng Jung-Il so guess was nice finally reading Korean again. The novel here was refreshingly plotless, the story of two friends meeting after a carpentry accident that prompts a sudden trip to Jeju during a snowstorm. It slips between the past and present while becoming half dream half reality...recalling their friendship and the Jeju massacre at the end of the 1940s coinciding with the war. So the generational trauma is handled well and I guess it would seem obvious but most don't realize the amount of fratricide that went on in the war. The Immediate north/south division after still reeling from Colonial rule from 1910 combined with the repressive military government in the south from then on ... they never really got to address, as a society, all of the trauma. Her writing goes back to this a lot as arguably with the majority of this golden age of cinema in Korea that they have been in techinally since "Shiri" in 1999 but certainly hitting their stride since. Any genre from horror with "The Host" or "Train to Busan" to a romantic comedy like "My Sassy Girlfriend" and more obvious in Boon Jon-Ho there is the underlying revenge then that begets nothing that is still really processing the all of the trauma through revenge...least I always felt. Much of African American culture is similar in this generational trauma that is still ongoing. Perhaps why I relate to their arts so much...I mean their art movement dansaekwha down to its materiality was about this. Her work here fits in with all of this while remaining wholly her own with a unique remarkably restrained style. Really refreshing for contemporary literature. #koreanliterature #contemporaryliterature by @jesselfreeman

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23 days ago

+the other time's ikebana

#ikebana #sogetsu #sogestuikebana #japaneseflowerarrangement #blackikebanaartist taken in Kyoto, Japan by @jesselfreeman

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25 days ago

+Beartooth Pass, Montana
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#leica #leicam6
#film #summicron50 #jchstreetpan400 by @jesselfreeman

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a month ago

#finishedbooks Hiroshi Sugimoto: Extinction by various. Picked this up at the exhibition of the same name at MOMAT. When I first was getting into photography I was a gigantic fan. The concepts and clarity of his ideas interested me greatly. I picked up photography first, then filmmaking and ikebana…and I really just had so many ideas to express but a limited means through my mediums. I guess I always wanted to be more than a photographer and saw that kinship through Sugimoto. Also, and I mean you can see it in his approach at the time I was really into Duchamp for the same reason again ...the ideas. Don't know for how long I had "Seascapes" on my wishlist and yet somehow never got to it. So although I would prefer a more specialized book, I got this to at least to have one Sugimoto book that functions more as a retrospective. I never saw the evolution of his art as this parallel of the evolution of man instead just seeing a through-line (literally) in his general austere aesthetics. From his first series "Dioramas" literally depicting earth's natural history to "Seascapes" questioning what a primitive man might actually have saw. From there he questions Sir Issac Newton's 17th century concepts with "Opticks" to large format portraits of historically wax figures. He shoots fossils, lightening...the orgins of fire for man, to fashion design... man coming out of the caves and covering themselves. So there is this theme that he shoots with a consistent austerity which I guess if dwindled down to one word would be ... origins. Yet he is a photo classicist at heart, always film, always a preoccupation with photos history...I mean for one series, he bought Talbot's undeveloped wetplats. And you can see again also his love of Ansel Adams and his perfect large format prints that exhibit the complete range of his zone system. With that after the early series "Theaters", "Architecture", and "Seascapes;" I must say "Opticks" is the only things I really like since. And in its presentation, it all lends itself to the Rothko Room lighting the exhibition entailed. All in all, really interesting. #bookstagram #hiroshisugimoto by @jesselfreeman

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a month ago

+the other time's ikebana

#ikebana #sogetsu #sogestuikebana #japaneseflowerarrangement #blackikebanaartist taken in Mitaka, Tokyo by @jesselfreeman

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a month ago