92 It was a few months after his arrival in Leipzig that I first started communicating with C. He had been exploring the city’s environs, photographing infrastructure and distribution warehouses. C described himself as a “self-employed web designer-slashdeveloper” but was quick to inform me that he was untrained in both design and programming. He explained that he had spent his adult life in and out of art schools, but it was his self-taught coding skills that made him a living. He wrote that, although it brought him no joy, he could at least pay his bills until a better opportunity arose. I guessed, from how he described himself, that he must be nearing forty years old. He had moved to Leipzig after joining a post-graduate programme in photography at the city’s academy of fine arts. Despite his age and already having a master’s degree – a qualification that, he wrote, had led to little if any career progression – he thought the programme might offer him a “last chance” for his artistic endeavours to be recognized and thereby the possibility to give up his day job. As his time at the school drew on, however, he became more and more resigned to a sense that he had in fact missed the boat many years earlier. He reported that, if nothing else, he was pleased to have short-term access to the academy’s photographic equipment, not needing to make do with his own aging, semi-professional camera, or having to pay rental fees out of his precarious income. 92
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