TIME OF THE HUNTER
In 1931 the outstanding German literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote his essay “A Short History of Photography.” There Benjamin examines the creative work of genius French photographer Eugene Atget, who made so perfect photos of empty Paris streets of the late 19th – early 20th centuries that later he was called “Balzac of camera.”
Benjamin’s favorite term is aura, “a strange intertwining of place and time: unique feeling of distance, no matter how far the viewed object is.”
The meaning of Atget’s works is that they “are not deserted, but lack atmosphere; the city in these photos is clean like an apartment before new dwellers move in. Such are the results that enabled the surrealistic photography to prepare the curative estrangement between a man and environment. It frees the space for a politically versed eye which ignores all the intimate connections for the sake of accurateness of the reflected details.”
The details in Atget’s photos are so accurate that painters of his time bought his shots for their work.
Meanwhile, today it is clear that a specific aura, the very unique feeling of distance mentioned by Benjamin, was accumulated in Atget’s photos. But this distance is somewhat different: historical interval which has turned into aesthetic distance. These images have acquired the value of items of theater, cinema, and painting which did not exist in Benjamin’s time. Atget’s photos have accumulated the visual information produced later, and before that became more surrealistic and more similar to thoroughly drawn dreams which one wants to see many more times again.
Another Benjamin’s observation sounds very topical these days: “In fact, an amateur photographer who returns home with numerous artistic photos is a no more gratifying phenomenon than a hunter who returns from an ambush with so much game that only would be reasonable if he meant to sell it… This is about the way people now make photos of everything.”
Today is indeed the time of hunters. A stroller who observes the city in most unexpected and paradoxical details (making photos as well) recedes before a hasty tourist with a point and shoot camera. It is hard to imagine more different things than desert dreams of Atget and today’s stream of amateur shots that is flooding the Internet.
But it is too early to speak about total devaluation of photography. Moreover, the notion of aura today seems quite acceptable.
NECKLACE OF ACCIDENTAL THINGS
September 1. A dazzling day, full of burning sun.
Two young men in jeans and black T-shirts approach me and turn to the yard. One of them says something with a smile, pulls up his shirt, and scratches his belly, while his low-waist jeans strip down to his underwear, but the guy does not feel confused about this. His friend has tattoos on his shoulder: a triangle and a sea turtle.
On my way to the subway station I leave behind a mother who pushes a pram with a little joyful blonde, who is about two years old and has a dummy in her mouth. I try to smile in response, but she finds something more interesting. Two tall teenager girls in short skirts are walking towards me. I try to imagine them sitting at a school desk. A middle-aged man walks out of a car (with his wife and son) and follows the girls with his eyes much longer than it would be appropriate.
In a subway station there is a long line to the ticket window. In the line before me another girl in a miniskirt is holding an aquarium, which is wrapped in adhesive tape and houses an alarmed turtle.
I put the money for a monthly travel – it is blown out by draft, I put it again, it is blown out again; I have a feeling that someone is throwing it out on purpose; the cashier, who does not notice the draft, looks at me perplexed; finally I manage to pay. The cashier’s surname is Horlo (Throat).
In the train a fair-haired, somewhat strained girl in even shorter skirt than I had seen before, is sitting next to me, clasping two bouquets of flowers to her chest. There is a drop of water on her tanned kneel. I wonder, how many flowers she received during the summer? The transparent circle on her skin has a hypnotizing effect on me, and finally I shift my gaze, having noticed near the window a tiny white paper flower, masterfully folded by someone without a reason, just to wear through the time between stations.
The day has rolled these pictures with all of their inner rhymes before my eyes in a matter of less than 15 minutes. These are my personal diamond placers, and it does not matter whether I will be able to use them to create a more or less interesting fiction text with a concrete plot. This treasure is already with me.
The same impressions can be conveyed by a range of photos, but a connecting commentary will still be needed – in a word, the visual will again turn into the literary.
What is important is that I owned this joint of interesting accidents which were presented to me. And photos here could become a certificate which would prove this possession.
So, by making photos we receive a document of ownership for the moment which will fly away probably even sooner than we hear the click of camera.
CHANGE OF ANGLES
What happens when there are no more small details? When you feel the ground slipping away from your feet and practically round the corner mass sacrifices are being made and civilizations are altering?
The photo becomes precious evidence as an instrument of influencing the minds. If you make photos of revolution and war, consequently, you take one or another side. The person who presses a camera button to finish the momentary fixation of reality which flies off the handle is simultaneously a witness, an archivist, a rebel (and participant).
There is a different aura. It is imposed by history, not art. This is an aura of total overcoming of the estrangement, when the “intimate connections” marked by Benjamin turn into trajectories of the movement of freedom, tyranny, death, and love.
CLOSENESS
During the winter revolution every ordinary protester, rather than political leaders, became the protagonist of the area, and by portraying him the photographers managed to break through the limits of report reasonability. The stage settings of collisions, panoramas of meetings, landscapes of streets on fire are important, but the close-up of a demonstrator was the core figure of visual rhetoric this winter, an exhibit on a barricade was the most appropriate genre of the exposition.
The first exposition of this kind, “Human Factor,” was placed to the grid of the barrier built in front of the barricade from the side of the European Square: the demonstrators who sleep, fight, rejoice, who are in love, singing, severe, and alarmed. The collection, which was replenished with a greater regularity than any other exposition, conveyed the emotional rainbow of the protest.
The activists at the same time adorned the fence around the reconstruction of the Central Department Store in Khreshchatyk Street with a long range of portraits executed in a simpler manner: close range or half-length full-face portraits, some of the models wearing masks or respirators, under a general headline: “Ukraine is everyone.” In January on the wall of one of historical houses near Maidan a group of Kyiv artists implemented the Ukrainian part of the project “InsideOut,” launched by famous French street artist JR who specializes in flyposting – placing of huge black-and-white photos of ordinary people. Two years ago he proposed to distribute this format internationally. The shots of smiling revolutionaries, stuck into window apertures laid with bricks as if into frames, owing to successful placing conveyed the main motive of Maidan: the significance of every deed; everyone who came to the square became a star.
Whereas Maidan used films, graffiti, and caricatures to appeal to the world, with these photos it took a deeper look into itself.
The aura of the Atget’s photos enchants with the distance. The aura of our momentary first-hand account is, on the contrary, an all-time closeness of a look. You look at a photo and in a sense through it, look at yourself, into yourself. You look at history you created or are creating through its eyes.
A short circuit of seconds, equal to eternity.
