Someone Else’s Tuesday

The fantasy of swapping lives with someone isn’t really about going somewhere else. It’s about briefly inhabiting a different version of yourself—waking up with different obligations, a different commute, different reasons to be exhausted by evening. The geography is almost incidental.

Italian photographer Claudia Zalla did something close to that when she traded her Milan existence for a few days inside the Berlin life of Willy Iffland, a hyperactive blogger who apparently runs on the city’s particular frequency. She brought her camera, which is the right thing to bring anywhere you haven’t been before.

What she found was the standard Berlin inventory—the S-Bahn, a burger place, the grey river doing its thing—but photographed with the attention of someone for whom it was still new. That’s the gap where the interesting photographs tend to live: not the outsider’s awe, not the local’s blindness, but somewhere in the middle. Already arrived with context, still looking anyway.

I’ve done something like this in the opposite direction—landed in a city I’d already half-constructed in my head from photographs and other people’s writing, and then had to un-construct it in real time against the actual place. You notice the gap between the city and your idea of it, and inside that gap is where your own assumptions become visible to you. It’s disorienting and clarifying at the same time, and it tends to produce better work than comfort does.