Seeing in photographs something that thought itself cannot think.
“To want to discover something that thought itself cannot think”, to take Kierkegaard’s hope, is perhaps the reason why some of us look at photographs.
Some photographs create a strong sense of something before thought, a stillness. It’s not a static slumping type of stillness, but more a feeling that we are on the brink of an abyss looking beyond, a prevarication, yet indifferent as to time and place. It is difficult to describe because as soon as we bring awareness of it into focused attention, it changes into an object of propositional thought, shorn of its pre-attentive quality. It is amenable only to intuition and so we learn to approach it sideways, as if a full-on gaze would evaporate it away.
Perhaps this ‘something before thought’ can best be thought of as ‘mood’ in the manner discussed by Heidegger, for such a characterisation would afford us a range of experiences:
Order from Chaos
In Alex Webb we have a photographer who has a wonderful knack for distilling order from chaos.
Here, each figure is made to be together at this instant, almost. The “almost” figure, hiding behind a book, accentuates the belonging of the others to each other. This ability to orchestrate many parts into one whole provides a sense of completeness. Our minds, abhorring chaos, find a place of immediate rest in this completeness.
Deep Shade
The tree sits as a sentinel on the edge of a dark wood. We immediately see its foliage and boughs but it is the blackness beyond that draws us in. As in much of her work, Awoiska celebrates shades of darkness, reminiscent of the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō (1886 –1965) who extolled the virtues of shade in his essay “In Praise of Shadows”. The darkness conjures up a sense of the ineffable and the imagination is invited to play. I am reminded of a verse from Tennyson
Come into the garden, Maud,
For the black bat, night, has flown.
Come into the Garden, Maud,
I am here at the gate alone
And the woodbine spices are wafted abroad
And the musk of the rose is blown.
Paul Caponigro explored the texture of darkness in this study.
The darkness has its own solidity and place of repose. It is the stuff of the photograph in that here darkness is more than the absence of light.
Darkness beckons us to inquire about what is hidden. We leave the certainty of superficial surfaces to search for a deeper meaning. We close our eyes to shut out the light, taking refuge in our internal world. We leave the world of surfaces and rest in the hidden.
Pathos
The photograph “Transience” by Sacha Ferrier, is based on the bedside table of his dying wife.
The symbolism in this photograph needs no explanation. The underlying pathos, “tears of things”, confronts us with the transient reality of existence and installs in us a fresh attitude to the things around us. Objects acquire a new significance reminding us of the fact that, as Heidegger said, being is time.
Austere Beauty
There is a forlorn starkness (Wabi) about the image of pine trees. In this photograph by a master, Bien-U-Bae, we experience a moment of solitude, even in the crowded places of our chattering minds.
Continuity of Consciousness
“Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, at the moon only when it is cloudless?” Yoshida Kenkō asks in his ‘Essays in Idleness’.
This picture of long grass points us to ordinary moments. In today’s headlong race for consuming experiences we look for special moments. Experiences between these special moments get squeezed out as not meriting attention. They are erased from memory, edited out of our lives. We live hopping from one special moment to another and in so doing we pay little attention to each and every moment. We sleep-walk through life.
In looking at long grass afresh we remind ourselves of the specialness of seemingly ordinary moments. What is ordinariness?
Patina
A photograph by Minor White:
The chipped rim and scorch marks of this bowl point to a lifetime of drama (Sabi). The dramas have gone; the bowl remains, its lived-in age bearing testimony to its own experience, calling to mind the past that made them.
Spirit
Japanese street photographer Noguchi tells a story here about a woman’s determination to go about normal life despite adverse conditions. Difficulty need not lead to suffering. Difficulty we cannot always avoid; suffering we perhaps can. A sense of nonchalance in adversity connects us to something bigger than us.
The Little Detail
Blossfeldt’s rigour gives a sense of other-worldliness to commonplace things. Detail in approach is everything. His uniformly blank backgrounds, consistency of angle and use of natural light from northern windows together create the little details that transform his plants into more than plants. The plant, cut away from its own roots, becomes a new thing to be contemplated, like ikebana in a Japanese alcove.
Paradox
In this paradoxical photograph, Cartier-Bresson challenges us to make sense of things much like a puzzle or zen koan. We look at the face with the cigar and we look at the man peering through a black void. Our minds cannot keep both subjects within attention at the same time and is confronted with a discontinuity in flow. With effort, the photograph appears to make sense, flow is re-established but a lingering doubt remains.
Final words
Photography has the power to help us experience ourselves as unmet needs much like any art or music. But some photographs do this more obliquely by searching for the hidden within us, demanding to be peered into. It is these photographs, often quiet ones, that can be the most profound.
