Abstract
Peter and I have only met in person once – at the 2010 launch of the Bauman Institute at the University of Leeds. But 10 years later we embarked on a most enjoyable 18-month online relationship, as we discussed and planned our co-edited book, The Photographs of Zygmunt Bauman (Beilharz and Wolff, 2023), which was published in June 2023. We met often on Zoom – usually every fortnight – and I had to get used to my envy when it was cold in February in Manchester and I was looking at Peter in T-shirts in 30-degee temperatures in Melbourne. (I must say he does have an excellent collection of interesting T-shirts.) Even more provocatively, occasionally he would be in a place near the beach, and would swing his laptop round to show me the sea and the blue sky. Still, in June and July things were looking better (for me), and he was the one wearing heavy roll-neck sweaters for our online chats.
The project came about in a series of chance events. In September 2020 my editor at Manchester University Press (MUP) told me they had just published a new book by Peter – this was his memoir about Zygmunt, Intimacy in Postmodern Times: A Friendship with Zygmunt Bauman (Beilharz, 2020). I got a copy right away, and loved it. I wrote to tell Peter how much I had enjoyed it, and he told me in return that he had very much liked my own recent MUP family memoir, Austerity Baby (Wolff, 2017). He said he had been thinking of writing to me, to suggest doing something together on Zygmunt’s photographs (prompted, I think, by a conversation he had had with Anna Sfard, Zygmunt’s oldest daughter). We had both been photographed by Zygmunt during his period of serious photography (more or less the 1980s), and knew well the upstairs ‘studio’ (bedroom) and downstairs ‘dark room’ (pantry). We each had long friendships with Zygmunt, Janina and the Bauman family, mine going back to 1973 when I joined Zygmunt in the sociology department at Leeds. And we both had a strong interest in visual art, and knew that we had very much admired many of the photographs. So from the start the project was an exciting one.
It went well, with very few tricky moments, mostly to do with negotiating publication. We had strong support from the Bauman family (10 members of whom are represented by short essays in the book), and from the Bauman Institute, which funded us for open access publication with MUP. We acquired excellent essays from several Bauman scholars, including getting permission from his family to reprint a lovely piece by the late Keith Tester on Bauman and film. I don’t know how unusual this is, but I can’t remember any disagreements or arguments between us as Peter and I worked through the stages of planning, commissioning, writing, editing, proofing. We somehow, from the start, had pretty much the same idea of what we hoped for in this book. It was a real pleasure working together. It was also a life-saver in some ways, in the months of the pandemic. Our project more or less coincided with the COVID years, and so working on Zoom wasn’t as peculiar as it might otherwise have been – we were doing that all the time anyway, even with our colleagues and students in the same city. In an otherwise weird and solitary period the fortnightly online meetings were an hour or two of pleasure and connection – something to look forward to.
It was wonderful to see the book published, and we have had some good feedback. But I found I did miss the regular virtual connection we had so successfully established. Peter and Zygmunt Bauman Leeds, 2015 Peter in Curtin University, Perth, 2017
