01 - ROUTES
Plato Rivellis: We are immersed in photographs. All of us. At least our generation. Nevertheless, we do not know the language of photography. We use photography as a reference that takes us to a familiar language of sounds, words, a spoken or written language, but not to the photographic language. On the other hand, I believe that the public is ignorant of many other areas. I don’t think anyone, unless they are initiated, can easily understand music, painting, or even poetry, in which our people have a tradition. Thus, a familiarization with the language is needed. In photography, things are more difficult because the world thinks it understands what it sees because it has become familiar with the phenomenon of photography, but it has not familiarized itself with the contemplation over the artistic language of photography.
Andreas Pagoulatos: Many of the great photographers are very difficult to understand, to understand the particularity of their language. They create a great difficulty for me to understand their language and perhaps if we take more the process that generates these works, namely photography next to photography, the photographic cycle that gradually takes place through their photographs, the photographs of each of these photographers, I think we will more functionally enter their photographic universe and understand the stratigraphy, the various levels of their creation.
PR: The faces of each photographer and when I say faces I can also mean the landscapes or the events gradually gain a meaning with the kinship they have with each other. That is, the language in a photographer is something that emerges from the many photographic sounds which over time compose something new and something personal and special. Now, the particular problem of photography is that the world is not simply unfamiliar with the artistic language but is conversely familiar with a language derived from the field of general entertainment, what the Americans call entertainment, a confusion that exists in cinema, and sees photographs that are pleasant or photographs with specific goals, understands them, that is, essentially understands their purpose and accepts them. In front of a great photographer, however, the most common question of an uninitiated viewer is, so what? What happened? What does it show us? Why a tree that is not a tremendous tree, why a woman who is not so beautiful nor so ugly can have photographic value? Well, I would say that in general terms there is a photography that we all know and that we would call applied. Applied does not necessarily mean technical or medical photography, it means that but also means the journalistic photography that we constantly encounter in daily print. Obviously, it is also advertising which I could say is covered under a very general term, commercial photography. All this photography has something easy, that is, it knows where it is going. It knows where it is aiming. It is not searching. The photography we are talking about is a photography let's say artistic despite the burden that this word has, a photography that on the contrary tries to find ways, explores, searches, does not know where it will reach. On the one hand, therefore, we have this applied and on the other the artistic. Without the distinctions being so clear. And indeed I would say that the most interesting are those that are in the marginal space that goes from one area to the other.
AP: Do you believe, Plato, that photography is a scientific technical discovery or rather I would say more, a more holistic and complex invention that moreover, how shall I put it, tends to become autonomous, to acquire, as we said earlier, its own language. And thus, transcending its technological dimension to be affirmed as art.
PR: I think that our history tells us that photography was born as a scientific event. That is, various amateur manic scientists discovered, concluded and possibly at the same time most of them, to the same results. The first use that people of photography made was applied. I suppose that all the first arts were done with some metaphysical religious purpose. And dance and music and painting. (05:24) not only started but most years had as a gift if you will this metaphysical dimension because they were done in religious frameworks. Without wanting to enter the realms of art historians I think the Renaissance begins in the west and overturns this thing. Therefore, the other arts have many centuries of religious past and few centuries of non-religious past. While photography was born at a time when there was no religious space to accept it, and not only did it not exist, religious spaces were hostile to it and mainly the spaces like the Muslim religion the Protestant doctrine that did not want the depiction. Thus it is born in a non-metaphysical space from purely technological achievements. And gradually some people and there we will see it along the way, seeing photographs, one of them in my opinion was Julia Margaret Cameron (Julia Margaret Cameron) realizing almost subconsciously although the specific woman rather consciously, that this medium has the potential for a personal artistic expression. And we will come to the 20th century to see an increasing general consciousness that photography constitutes an artistic expression.
Julia Margaret Cameron is the first, known at least, photographer in the history of photography with a structured and fully conscious work. She was born in Ceylon to a British Army officer father, foul-mouthed heroic and drunk, and a mother of French and aristocratic descent. It is likely that the contradictory qualities of her parents contributed to shaping her dynamic and sensitive character. It is a fact, however, that these characteristics fascinated the legally educated and much older Charles Hay Cameron who, although a husband of the Victorian era, not only permitted but also encouraged her artistic tendencies. Their home in England was filled with important scientists and artists. Her literary evenings had left an era. When in the middle of her age she suddenly found herself alone with her children married and her bustling house almost deserted, she received a gift from her daughter—a photographic camera. A popular game for the affluent class of the era. However, Cameron was aware that this tool would bring her closer to creation. And indeed, from then on and for the remaining 16 years until her death in 1879, she devoted herself to the new world that was the people photographed by her. Her influences were clearly painterly. Nonetheless, if one escapes from the surface, it becomes clear that Cameron, who had no reference to a photographic past, had understood from then, and this is clearly visible in the gazes of her heroes, that if photography is not penetrated by time, it remains completely uninteresting.
What convinces about the artistic dimension of photography is the personal language developed by the great photographers—creators. And it is these great ones who establish the identity of the photographic medium so that the rest of us are in a position to attempt even the alteration of it. Eugene Atget was one of them and certainly the most enigmatic. He began engaging with photography in about the middle of his life and gave himself and others the impression that he simply recorded Paris, the passersby, and the houses while in reality, he was building a work of monumental rigor comparable to that of Piero della Francesca in painting or Johann Sebastian Bach in music. He adopted the absolutely clear description as the main weapon for achieving transcendence. He avoided any easy emotional charge and remained attached to the very power of the object. And so, he leaves the viewer with the hint of the existence of a hidden element that may come to overturn the absolute calm and balance of the world he proposes. This tragic dimension lends his photographs anguish and inspires respect. Everything lies before us in a state of sober despair in their effort to conquer balance. When Atget died in Paris in 1927, few knew him, but fortunately among them was the American photographer Berenice Abbott, thanks to whom his work reached us. The fear that the work of a great creator, like so many others in the history of art, could forever remain unknown, adds to the lonely rigor of his images the dimension of a constantly precarious and vulnerable artistic process.
I think that all of us who are even slightly involved in artistic matters have agreed that any transfer of reality has no interest. Therefore, gradually one must realize, both the public and the photographer, where lies that mysterious look of photography that lends an event its photographic value. I could say it even more clearly or almost provocatively, either I have a photograph or I do not. There is hardly any middle ground, no doubt. If there is doubt, I will say that I have a bad photograph or, even better, I have a non-photograph at least from the artistic side.
AP: Plato, I would like you to comment on some words by André Kertész. He writes, "I looked, I saw, I acted." At another point he says, "Photography is my diary written with light." On one hand. On the other, "Photography must be realistic." Where do you find that the subjective of a diary can coexist with the objective element of a realistic and therefore to some small or large extent objective recording?
PR: The challenge in art generally is the transformation of a reality, from which all the arts start, into a personal, spiritual vision. Of course, here enters a very big question, and I would not like anyone listening to us to think that we speak from a pulpit and with absolutely clarified opinions, but indeed within us there is a perception of what is art. However, if we accept that art is a way to start from a visible reality, from the senses that convey this reality to you, and to transform it, to metamorphose it, into a spiritual reality that passes through the personal filter of the creator then things begin a little and clarify. That is, what Kertész says and is extremely correct, and especially because Kertész has this disarming simplicity, as much in his photographs as in his speech, he is I would say a simplistic intellectual and for this very attractive, cannot but be realistic photography from the moment its raw material is more than any other art the reality. The existing fact, as much as we distort it in a photograph, is what we have in front of us. Therefore, it must be realistic. But what is it that makes this realistic, this reality, it transfers to a spiritual first and personal second space. It is this personal diary.
AP: Realism therefore expands in a sense. It touches, as Joyce let's say in literature, the inner life of the creator, the photographer.
PR: Perhaps the creator, photographer or otherwise, would not know what his life is if he did not try to photograph the world. Because the world in our eyes is something given. As given as a simple photograph. It begins and acquires a personality filter at the time through the act, hence the act that Kertész says, I saw, but I saw means I saw through my own eyes, I did not just record. I saw and acted and through the realism of the image, this constitutes the medium of photography, I was able to reach a world that I would not have known if it did not exist. This is also very interesting for us the rest of the people because why are we interested in art maybe; Because we love artists or some artists; Because through them we get to know many worlds, or many versions of the world without the mediation of which they would have been unknown to us. There is this charm, the attraction from the world of each artist.
André Kertész deceives us with the amazing melodies that he inexhaustibly invents, to delight us before we realize that under the easy first approach hides a complex look that requires our active participation. The great photographer born in Hungary at the end of the last century always felt emotionally attached to France where he spent the best and most creative years during the interwar period, together with the most significant artists of our century in Paris. He walked the road of life that was due to him with childish curiosity, with tenderness, and with humility. And he never stopped photographing and especially without allowing external events to affect his photographic search. It was always what kept him upright even after the death of his wife when he continued after 90 to photograph small objects in his small apartment or the square in front of his balcony just as he had done almost every day all the previous years. The power of Kertész lies in the symmetry, clarity, and simplicity with which he renders the majesty of the silence expressed by the photograph.
In his hands, the details reveal the mysteries of a whole that we are unable to grasp. For Kertész as perhaps for every great photographer the insignificant is nothing but the significant that no one has yet brought out of obscurity.
The Czech photographer Josef Sudek could have remained for us another unknown if shortly before his death in 1976 he had not met the American photographer Sonja Bullaty who made his work known to us. Sudek understood that the whole world can fit in one detail of his. And that the strange is in front of our door just enough to look at it. For this reason, he limited the scope of his photographic interest to his house, his garden, and his beloved Prague. Perhaps this was contributed to by the fact that he was one-armed and that he worked with a large format camera. This limitation of his boundaries allowed him to give greater importance to the photographic search than to the subject itself. To use the artistic and descriptive elements of each photograph contrastingly. To transform the common objects of his surroundings into small photographic stories. To skillfully avoid the dangers of artistic aestheticism and philological verbosity bringing them face to face. At the same time as the plasticity of the objects showcases their beauty, their utilitarian presence comes to negate it. The mixing of so many disparate elements generates curiosity and gradually anxiety. Sudek leads us into the world of magic and fairy tale.
I am also very interested in another dimension of photography that is very current and known to everyone. The commemorative photograph. The space of this commemorative is not only a space of applied photography. Obviously, the person who photographs his children or his trips to keep them in an album does so with the illusion that he has a purpose. To keep. If he sits and thinks a little he sees that he does not keep anything, his time has passed. And that what he kept in the album has no relation to what is around him. And possibly no relation to what he keeps in his memory. Therefore, I believe that this space of so-called commemorative photography, this very widespread space, is not just interesting but we can call it the antechamber of artistic creation.
AP: Are there cases of photographers who carry the photography within them? While others discover it and record it externally? Are there cases of internal photography?
PR: Maybe these are mixed. Although efforts have been made by serious theorists to distinguish the two types of photography, that is, those that have to do with the world, that is, a window to the world, the recording of the world and those that have to do with our inner world that we would call a window to our inner world, or a mirror of ourselves. I believe that at least in the highest art in the photography we love, these things are mixed. At the time I face the world I face it through the mirror of myself.
AP: Within this problematic how would you see the so-called formalist photography, for example, a great photographer who I think or at least I think is great like Moholy Nagy.
PR: Look, form is a very big issue, and which exists anyway, as a problematic within every good photograph and there one can talk quite easily because it is something visible, something existent. If however, we started from the gaze of a portrait of Cameron. Before we discover what size we will characterize as form, what as content, what as subject, and all that which we will develop together at some point, we will taste an emotion and an emotion of an unprecedented rigor because it is as if it comes out of a personal tragedy. Two eyes that look at us, those eyes of Cameron's model were looking at the photographer, we see what was in front of the photographer but in some strange way we know that it was not exactly like that, nor will it ever be like that again, this is then the emotion of the photographic event. And only the very great photographers can convey it to us.