I am thinking of the video work Voir la mer by Sophie Calle which I saw yesterday at the Musée national Picasso-Paris. Six videos of Istanbul residents seeing the sea for the first time in their lives. They are filmed from behind, looking at the sea. Then they turn around. One of them is very self-conscious in the beginning, looking into the camera.

During the ceasefire in Gaza, the Palestinians were told it was forbidden to go to the sea.

One of the books in my suitcase after my stint at the Polycopies book fair during Paris Photo was Our Pocketkamera 1985 by Seiichi Furuya. After clearing out his attic, Furuya found films from a Kodak Pocket Instamatic camera he had given to his wife Christine in 1978. She continued to take photographs until she took her own life in 1985. This book contains mainly pictures taken by Christine, Furuya and their son Komyo, together with texts written by Furuya.

You send me an old image of yourself somewhere in the West, near where I grew up. A squinting, grinning child, facing the sun, feeding a lamb, one hand holding on to a metal string fence. There is text written over the image. An invitation. But my mind is distracted by another image, and we text about it. I'm leaning on the hope that in our knowledge of the fickle status of images, of their bending, we still have a capacity that can help us think, even when we're distracted.

What is it, a naked woman painted in silver print, dancing in the empty halls of Palais de Tokyo? The world is sinking and everyone says that nothing matters except what's happening in Gaza, and I couldn't agree more. And yet I go to exhibitions because art tends to make a difference, art might matter, at least I hope so. I haven't read anything about in beforehand, and am met with a lot of hotel beds and screens above them with men talking, and videos of the artist dancing in the same hall that we're in.

In an envelope from the Asker photo service - dated 18 November (the year is unknown) - found in his study, there were a few strips of positive film that Peter Wessel Zapffe, or his wife Berit, had delivered to re-order some prints. The first photo on the film was taken from the second floor of the house in Asker, depicting the sun setting over Nordre Follo.

IT IS A QUIET and early summer morning here in the kitchen. Mari and the boys are still asleep, the girls watching the classic animated version of The Jungle Book in the living room. The sun has been up for a while already, a warm breeze coming through the open window, with the sound of birds. I drink my coffee by the table, watching the city landscape.

What’s left when the money moves on? For Bjarne Bare’s latest book, the artist directs his camera onto the remains of capitalism when its gears grind to a halt.

On my mind an image by Maria Pasenau, intimately exposing herself and her fiancé in a show about herpes. Standing in a small cubicle in the gallery’s cellar, covered in wallpaper containing a mix of patterns and positive and negative portraits of the fiancé, feels like being in their love-making room.

“Sloppy has always been good, meant sexy,” Eileen Myles wrote in her iconic book Chelsea Girls. I would agree with Eileen. Her statement is contemporaneous with when Wolfgang Tillmans was photographing youth culture, in the first half of the ‘90s. His images depict people who are sloppy in the most gratifying sense: casual, heedless, uninhibited.

Consider American artist Zoe Leonard’s recent photographs, presented in New York in an exhibition titled In the Wake. They depict family snapshots from the period after World War II when her forebears were stateless. The original images, taken as her family fled from Warsaw to Italy to London to the United States over the course of more than a decade, offer scenes of intimacy that contrast with the era’s international clashes and their messy aftermaths.

I’m currently looking a lot at images like this, which are in a kind of hybrid state between the hyperreal and the abstract, between fact and fiction. It is perhaps not this particular photograph by Julian Faulhaber that fascinates me, but rather the type of photography it represents, images that with crystal clear sharpness depict something with a detailed and zealous attention and yet does not really reveal anything.

This photograph of young Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, was taken by an old man with a box camera on Coney Island in 1969. The image is used on the cover of Smith's book Just Kids, which revolves around the relationship between the two, and on how they together began their respective artistic careers.