Birgit Glatzel
Who makes friends anymore? You friend them (on Facebook).
In ‘making’, you mold contract of trust with–going through the timeline–first a stranger, then acquaintance, finally, a friend and become a friend yourself. It is a position of merit, a role that necessitates a type of creativity and playfulness as you learn how to communicate according to the quirks that run through a different existence, grafting secret lexicons triggered by the odd turn of his word, a lift of her brow. Now, just as the phrase to make friends with have been contracted to the verb (or verbed as some assualtants on the English language would put it) to friend, bypassing the available if somewhat old-fashioned equivalent to befriend, relationships have similarly been flattened into a modern virtual currency. A relationship that would have been forged over a month is packaged, stamped, and delivered with a Facebook request. Fingers become trigger happy to rack up Friend numbers; everyone seems popular now.
Birgit Glatzel is a defender of making friends. An architect by training, she put on a Rolleiflex after discovering a childhood camera one day and for four years traveled 19 countries, staying first with her friends, then through them, meeting in 340 persons, crossing degrees of separation. Her massive collection of photos A friend is a friend of a friend is the result, invoking in their material immensity the question, what’s the weight of knowing another being?
