A portrait of OLIVIER ZAHM IN NEW YORK BY HIS FAVORITE JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHER DAIDO MORIYAMA in his book No.15, a personal publishing project called Record.
Why write to Oliver Zahm? Why indeed. If I’m honest, I just got curious, sometimes, as I’d put it, you want to see what happens if you ask a question you’d usually keep to yourself. Why not send a message to the man who, let’s say, made ennui at least something worth paying attention to, and turned culture into something you keep questioning instead of settling?
Who is Oliver Zahm? I’d say he’s the co-founder of Purple magazine and a photographer, but that barely covers it. Some call him a provocateur; to me, he looks more like someone who’s always looking for the next thing to connect, or just the next story to chase, even if it goes nowhere or refuses to make sense. His magazine is famous, maybe infamous, for putting philosophy side by side with party photos, and for making space for artists, writers, and thinkers who aren’t usually invited to the main table. That’s the mix that made me curious in the first place, more about how he sees things, or what he thinks is still missing.
I think about the way Purple magazine made room for philosophy and trashy Polaroids. And that’s the kind of culture I care about most.
When I think about culture these days, I don’t really see it as one big thing anymore, if that ever existed. From my perspective, culture rarely looks like something shared or agreed on. Maybe it’s more like this: most of the time it just feels like the same patterns on repeat, honestly, and then, once in a while, something weird or unexpected cuts through and wakes you up a bit. “The eye has to travel,” and I think art does, too. Both need to keep moving, at least that’s how I see it: they drift, or they stall.
It feels more like a patchwork, messy, inconsistent, made out of what we notice, what we keep, and what we ignore without even realizing it.
I believe curation is about making connections that look impossible but somehow work. Curation, at least how I see it, leaves the seams visible, the edits, the mistakes, the parts that don’t quite work but somehow still belong, and instead of closing doors, it invites more people in. The internet amplifies this, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Whether something is new or traditional matters less to me than whether it feels alive or makes me double-take. That’s why my questions for Oliver are actually as simple as they can be, the kind I’d actually ask a friend.
If the internet is good for anything, maybe it’s this: that strangers can slip into your story for a moment.
Here is our conversation.
a: What made you say yes to this, instinctively?
OLIVER: Precisely my intuition and my intention.
a: Did the urge to make something new (or the desire for more) ever really drive culture, or is that just a story I tell myself? For most of history, tradition and repetition may have mattered more than originality.
OLIVER: It’s always a new repetition of the same universal impulse: How to transform the world? How to transform pain into plaisir? Moment into eternity? Love into consciousness!
a: How much do curatorial choices shape what we recognize as culture today?
OLIVER: One artist said something like: ‘Art is what we do. Culture is what is done to us.’ And Godard: ‘Culture is the rule; art is the exception, and the rule wants the death of the exception.’ My choice is to try to preserve the exception as a pulsating possibility of change.
a: When you started Purple, what did you feel was missing, and does that absence still exist for you now?
OLIVER: Optimism for the future is not hope — it is a strategy.
a: What tension feels most interesting to you right now?
OLIVER: No tension. The opposite: imagine how to imagine peace