The Photographer Battles the Inevitable

Point. Shoot. fstop. Time. Cut. Develop. Preserve. Capture. Take.

the bravura.

I’m an old man now. I know about time. I know how I am not I. No longer. This mottling, freckling, wrinkling and mole-ridden flesh each new hour I am forced to call mine. The pain in the shoulders and the neck and the knees, my excruciatingly stooped back, my trembles and twitches…I fight back.

I capture the young. Flesh nubile and soft, pliable and pure, elastic. I carry my posture of strength, contracted muscles of athletic days on this little 3×5 glossy scrap, you see? Here’s uncle Mort – alive, swimming – BEFORE 1918 and he was no more. Pah! Right here friend! Right here is uncle Mort. And the Native Americans did live here first, and did wear strange clothing, ride horses, build tee-pees and clod huts – you see?

What might have been erased by vile death, by erosion, what we may have never truly “witnessed” or “seen” – right here through this powerful small cannon!

If we speak simply of existing, in whatever form (given what becomes of our actual bodies and minds) Atget has defeated death – you may challenge me to find his flesh, his bones, his musty breath – perhaps not! But here, right here! His aspect, his presence, his form. See? None of us, none of us, even those of us who greet it at our own hands, like death. We try to circumscribe it, undo and short-circuit its authority, vitiate its inevitability – well, here is how I do it!

Death and anonymity destroyed by the ambiguity of the lens! You may have no inkling WHO this subject is/was, but you will not doubt that they were, and therefore are in your ingestion of their image.

Beauty vs. decay. Beauty of decay. Youth versus age, the vitality of age. Life against death, or the life of death. I can capture it, exercise my will to power, stay the tide if only this moment, you see?

The action makes the difference in the arts. That I can take action against, on, within my world and produce a stoppage, an ongoing, an object that without me would not remain, be.

A salesman’s pitch, a preacher’s sermon, a whistling in the dark, you say – I say sure! I say it’s a banter and a babbling whistle, but it is my friend, it is. This is the significant battle, the valorous war. To take a stand against void while accepting its encroachment, to face up to destruction taking names and numbers, to perpetually freeze its moments, stop-gap, isolate and preserve. Seek and destroy.

I think of each shutter-click like a whittling, another shiver off death’s enormous trunk, a cut, a shape and scrape, a form emerges in its waste.

Death will assuredly do its worst. And we are.

The Photographer Speaks Candidly

Where it all begins, I suspect, is the “snapshot.” Whether family photo album, yourself messy-faced in diapers and high-chair, exotic postcards or history books – that strange “a-ha!” instigated by the similitude of the unknown or misremembered. The “whap” of what you imagine you’ve seen, fantasized, dreamt or been, suddenly presented to you as an instant, an image.

“Stealing a glimpse” kind of thing. A centuries-past wedding, the Rockies in sepia, a Hindu temple, your sister as a baby – the mystery of it, the magic! That first plastic camera, disposable and durable, that I used like a weapon as a boy. Bam! Bam! Blam! – my toe, my dog, the playground sand. Blast! Wham! Crack! – got you candy wrapper! Beetle! Back of daddy’s head!

What wonder, no? The outlaw Jesse James – preserved! The Eiffel Tower! Existed then, exists now, because of this contraption, this mad science. Africa, India, colors and clothing, languages, beliefs and cultures – perhaps! perhaps! – someone must have really been there – and something! – the camera may be able to lie, but it cannot create matter, substance! It records moments, minutes, on battlefields, of cheetahs, camels and pyramids!

I had a grandpa! Or I didn’t, but here’s a possible one – detached from his family of origin – available image – who really occurred – could be mine – you see?

For all the skewing of this miniscule eye…the fragile lens…the limiting range and frame, the delicate settings and the passage of time – in only a couple of centuries (as testament to its early stimulus and fascination) – our world has been literally flooded with these fragments. Images. Perhaps rivaling the entire history of visual arts, save writing, no?

So to start, it is enthrallment. Magic, mystery, forbidden, anonymous, it appeals to everything in human youth: the impossible! To experience – perhaps to capture! To seek – to startle – to freeze – to kill.

To take the photo. To grasp the image. To snap the shot. To keep the memory, its stimulus. In the blink of an eye.

I’ve never stopped.

The Photographer Poses a Nude

I proceed to enact a daguerreotype, a portrait, of a nude human body. I desire the body, the nude, for its pliable form. Shapable still-life, form requiring will. I will need to place my hands on you, move you, to sculpt your body into lights and shadows. I choose you because you are beautiful to me, interesting, unique. You consent, or choose, “for art,” you say, “for art I will remove all my clothing and exist only in my skin and bones,” “for art I will be naked.”

And I agree. Regardless of artifice or style, mechanisms or techniques, art reveals us naked, as we are in our skins, our fragile, porous borders. I must touch you. Art cannot occur in solitude. Always there must be “other.” Always there must be “form,” a here and a there, an inside / outside, a marking and memory.

I do not know how it feels for you to have my hands upon your body. You lie still. You are naked, are beautiful. I place my palm underneath of your knees and pull them up toward your chest. Your calves I press firmly along your thighs to the point where your heels cleave buttock. Sharp angles, slow curves, deep shadow. My fingers trace around your bottom and up the small of your back, learning your spine, your lines. I whisper.

Firmly, quietly, I shove your shoulder up over your knee and push your blade firmly, flattening a slope with a vertebrate edge, cupping the folds of your legs and creating shades of muscle and rib along the contortion of your back. Turning your face to the floor, I stress the creases of the tendons securing your neck. I use your hair like a pencil. Sketching and tracing the shape of your skull like thick charcoal, then drawing out strands for fine points, contour every which way of scapula and horizon, blade-rib-spine for highlight, sweet water of flesh as it pours your body and bends.

This takes time and concentration, you must hold still while your figure trembles. The arms? The hands? I flatten one out between my own, straining the fingers as widely as I’m able, squashing it against the surface where your face ought to be, now hidden beneath the likeness of your hair, pivoted on your nose and your crown. The other I stretch along your back to your bottom as a mirror, a reflected wave providing border and frame to the curling fetus of your twisting torso.

Hold there. Adjusting your digits to the swerve of your buttock, I tap them to the turn of your thigh. You are beautiful, pliable, soft. I stare. I close my eyes and gently feel my way over every shape of you in the dark. A blind man finding my way along the rocks of a beach, underwater. I imagine work onto paper, in wet clay or cool marble, correcting some angles of compromised gradients, pools of stasis, until you exist only as flow and obstruction. Yes there, yes there. How do you feel? Do not answer, you cannot afford to breathe, you are art, an object, an artifact.

Stay as I fix my devices, reform your surround, and manipulate tools. Stay.

We begin. I shape you, you will. I twist you, you choose. We wait, we wait, attendant to the sky.

The Photographer Discusses Poor Vision

Indeed there are days I’m uncertain. Unsure if I’m able to see. Since youth I’ve been blind, very nearly, “legally”? – yes, in my left, but spectacles account for that, I mean “vision.” Shapes, soft and blotted, everything variations of strangely spotted, fuzzy ovals. My natural eyesight is that I see what you see examining blood cells through a microscope. It’s a hell of a guess to proclaim something “tree,” or “car,” “human,” “house.”

My glasses restore what is known as “normal vision,” in other words, I’m enabled to distinguish walls and streets, eyes from mouths, blades of grass, shadows, pebbles, feathers even.

What I’m attempting to signify here is not accuracy, but that dread of poor vision, its undoing – where my eyes open out and register lines and fields, patches and frames, sketches and grounds, and I feel certain, uneasily assured, that what my brain is recording is itself. That these forms I “see” and “recognize” – sharp angles of a roof, scribbles on sky-canvas of a great bare cottonwood, spillages and squee-gee’s smears of walking figures – that these forms feel, in fact, to be formed. Forms formed by me. That rather than seek and capture I en-vision and create.

That the world is all dim-grey and full of shadows, and I mark it using light. Light is all – a motion, a shudder and click – and somehow I’ve reordered what might be there. My point of view, my stance. Decrepit old man with still the use of his fingers, albeit shaking, shooting willy-nilly, random violence, chopping up what is and nailing it in fragments.

At first I sought, I really sought. I ached a way to know what’s real. I hungered, craved, and wanted – to get out there, in there, attach – somehow seal myself to my surround – to objects. I thought: I’ll see something – something really there – and then I’ll, I’ll, well, I’ll prove it to myself – make a little monument, a document, an artifact that might bless me, secure me – I WAS HERE I SAW THIS – see? I indeed exist and was present – at least at that moment. That I might hold it, a thing, an object, something with matter, that matters.

But doesn’t repeat – you see? What I did with the light and the shapes, the forms and the shutter – my “settings” – that is what I look at again and again – it’s “developed” on me. What I saw develops as I see, and then again with each viewing, but is not, I repeat, is NOT what I took the picture of. Which was a moment. My prints, my negatives, are next moments, and next. New situations, new contexts – new sights: with the requisite distortion of my vision.

In the museum, the gallery, the box in my closet, laid out on my desk, with a friend on my couch – new forms, new shapes, new visions surround. Points of view.

Poor vision, you see? Inaccurate. Not the world or the subject, but me. Not my eyes (“corrected” by lenses), but what directs them to look, what selects their focus, blurs the contexts – my settings – what chooses. Responds.

My poor vision.

Imago

We all have it somewhere, a figure ill-informed and compositely made.

Mine begins like this: part-womb and part-breast, and hair of dark stars. There are wrinkles, faces mostly turned away or altogether absent, save on the specialist of days. It is not rounded. Mostly I study the back. I remain.

Fine-featured then, since I’m left to my own, hips holding rooms and breasts short by half. A particular’d elegance and a voice that soothes, all things I add to what’s missing.

I can smell her or him, scented of pollen and silt. I remain on the lookout, shaping the notes as lines on a canvas, rain over sky.

I believe it appears, here and there, a savior, a teacher, an object to adore. When faced with a mountain or storm I learn more. A natural wonder. There’s awe in the outline.

And passion. Words on a page, notes on a scale, a scintillant stirring.

It comes to light and it sings. In its movements, its promise, its sounds. I embrace and the figure is blurred. My dark shadow. It walks away, or I retreat and recoil.

It looks like this: fluid and sturdy, lithe and filled with quiet fuel. Eternal source (a womb, a breast) and distant constellation (object of desire) otherwise function of the Muse, symbol and seed woven together.

To follow after, and derive. Layered with impossible nourishment, what infinity breeds.