Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

Today I want to share some words of wisdom from one of my favorite authors: Rainer Maria Rilke. His book Letters To A Young Poet has always been a source of inspiration and guidance for me. I find myself returning to it every time I struggle, am impatient and frustrated with my work or myself. It consists of ten letters written to a young man who was about to enter the German military. His name was Franz Kappus, he was 19 years old, and he wrote Rilke looking for guidance and a critique of some of his poems. Rilke himself was only 27 when the first letter was written. The resulting five year correspondence is in a way an owner's manual on what it is and what is required to be an artist and a person. “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”