On Photography, 1995, Part 1, Faces
A photographer's world must be enclosed in a very small piece of paper, in a photograph.
The photograph speaks of a small piece of space and an equally small piece of time.
That is its content.
We know this is an illusion of reality. It is precise, an accurate description, but still an illusion. We look at the photograph and we know, we are certain, that what we see did exist.
Yet at the same time, we understand, we believe, that it never existed exactly like that and that it will never again exist exactly like that.
This uniqueness of the photographic moment is what gives value to its transmission and transcendence.
Transcendence is to exceed what I have before me, to exceed what I am photographing, but how do I exceed it?
To become one with it first, to identify, to penetrate it from within and to return to it differently. When we see a piece of life in a photograph, it is the piece of life that the photographer indeed captured, but it is never exactly like that.
The first photographer in history with a complete photographic oeuvre was the Englishwoman Julia Margaret Cameron. Although she should not have had photographic models at that time, nonetheless, through instinct and intelligence, she transformed the painting models, among which were the influences of her Pre-Raphaelite painter friends into images with a clear photographic magnetism.
When her daughter gifted her the first camera to pass her lonely hours, at a time when her children had grown up and made their own homes, she immediately understood that this game could become the passport for her artistic creation, for someone who had spent her life alongside, but only alongside, poetry and poets, painting and painters.
For sixteen years until her death, she immersed herself in her photographic work which consisted without exception of transforming relatives, friends, neighbors but also strangers who, swept up by her passion, agreed to sit patiently in front of her lens and share her enthusiasm.
With her suggestive lighting, staged movements, light blurring, and clerical attire, Cameron set up a theatrical scene with abstract and timeless backdrops and austere heroes. Perhaps because they know things that frighten to reveal to us.
In composition and arrangement often complex, but always harmonious, Cameron's heroes describe a world where kisses remain suspended, the wings of angels immobile, and the gazes of children questioning or frozen.
Photography has many mysteries. One of them is that we do not know when it is born and in what it is incorporated.
A small piece of paper that can be reproduced countless times cannot be the work of art. The image is the work, but also that which is found; When I press the button, I capture inside the camera, inside the film, a latent image. It can remain unseen for years, and the image may never appear. I do not know it but it is there. Some day in the darkroom, amidst the liquids, I will have the first imprint. Maybe it was born then; I do not know the date of its birth.
Many years later, in interwar Germany, August Sander adopts the beloved form of his time, absolutely objective and descriptive, to record the types of people who shared with him the life of a small town.
The teacher, the priest, the farmer, the gypsy, along with the children and the beggars and the blind, but also with the circus people and the persecuted Jews, would become not any more actors of the theater, as in Cameron's work, but pieces of a large mural of life, which in the model of the great masters of the stern Florentine and Flemish Renaissance speaks to us of worlds outside of time.
Sander's sampling does not exhaust the human samples, on the contrary, through the methodological typological repetition, it shows that the different human tesserae compose a set where the particularity emphasizes the kinships but also reminds us of the infinity of repetition.
Their sparse and typified stance, which no one knows and this is certainly a factor of success, whether they chose it or it was imposed on them, gives a dominant role to the details.
In the often contradictory background, in the almost always surreal posture of the body, in the visible position of the hands, in the idiosyncratic and characteristic garments, and finally in the calm eyes that penetrate us while they look at us.
Sander did not emphasize with social comments or superficial emotions his photographs. He allowed his subjects to remain ceremoniously still only. He emphasized the small elements that compose their image, but at the same time in a subterranean and discreet way connected them creating a museum collection that looks at us from high within and outside of time.
During about the same period across the Atlantic, the American Walker Evans was creating with the same meticulous morphological recording the mural of his own America.
He did not want, like Sander, to engage in the dubious game of emotional positioning against misery, as other compatriot photographers of his time did. The poor farmers of the ‘30s became in his hands serious figures, detached from their environment and their misery, showing us thus how man is something more complex and intricate than his happiness or his misery, but also how photography photographs life to give us photographs, that is something beyond life.
Evans captured them through their timeless dignity and not through their transient misery.
When he again turned to the streets of his country's major cities or delved into the underground railroad, he stole faces from the crowd, trying to give substance to what is lost among its similars. A fanatic collector of images, he knew that when something is isolated, it transforms. These figures, without ceasing to be scenes of a city and faceless individuals, become at the same time as he chooses them, portraits of specific people.
The photographer lives the city, lives the people, he has no reason to capture them. If he does this, it is because he wants to trace a process of photography. This gives him joy. If you want, therefore, he works first of all for himself. But he also works for a small audience.
Made up of those he loves and those he respects.
But he also works for a larger audience. And if someone among these unknown people enjoys his work, then that is great happiness for the photographer.
In the same America, several years after the war, the black photographer, Roy De Carava immersed in Harlem in New York, where he always found refuge, approaches with family warmth the simple and insignificant moments of lonely people, where fear, anger, and sorrow of his wronged fellow men lurk.
Through dark and underlit photographs emerge bodies that dance, that embrace, that look thoughtfully, that live their lives in dark corridors and empty spaces. De Carava does not create heroes, nor troupes. It is enough for him to observe his environment and what he loved in it while keeping his eyes half-closed.
The artist needs inspiration to make significant work. Only he does not know when it will come to him.
Therefore, he must work independently of it.
Many think that a photographer must work only when he has inspiration. On the contrary, a lot of work is needed to produce a very small point of inspiration. On his part, the viewer also needs inspiration to communicate with the work. However, he should not be discouraged if the path to approach is closed. At some point, he will find it open, and then he will enjoy. That is also a moment of inspiration.
Today's life in Europe, the doubts that tormented a generation between two worlds, the question marks of existence, even more intense in an era that has lost the ease of answers and redeeming theories, led the Englishman Craigie Horsfield to create a significant work that he kept hidden for years considering that it would say nothing to people immersed in the same problem, thus incapable of positioning themselves against it. However, when just 5 years ago his work came out, the world saw an evocative recording of life. The faces seem trapped without however sadness. The bodies are vibrant. Yet they already bear time engraved on them and everyone seems to be waiting, sitting in the middle of a platform for a train they do not know if will come.
The photographer is a collector. A collector of objects, landscapes, people, countries, moments, and time.
From the reality that surrounds us, he selects those details that fit into his own ideas about the world, in the obsession, in the persistent idea that must pursue a work. A photographer without a persistent idea is a photographer without personality.
In this process of collection, there will come a few moments when the spirit, the body, the heart, the hand will cooperate absolutely. And then we will have a work of high quality.