THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PHOTOGRAPHS
As below, the most beautiful photograph, according to Hubert Damisch, was possibly the first image Nicéphore Niépce fixed in 1822, using a camera obscura. A recent book on the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Fleur de l'Air: A Garden in Provence, contains a series of photographs taken by Volkmar Herre, with a pinhole camera, or camera obscura. I made a pilgrimage while in London recently, to the Victoria Miro Gallery, to get a copy of this book and was transported by the sublime images. The photographs are phenomenologically potent in their intuiting of sensation, the bringing in of a light which is from another time, where the images are brooding, introspective. The camera obscura itself, as an experiential device, is one which heightens emotion. Being within darkness dilates the pupils, a response which is associated with sadness, seemingly opening up the being to the sensation of lingering longing. This experience is somehow transported to the images themselves in the work of Vokmar Herre, where the gaze condenses upon the surface, and the photograph closes in around the viewer, a black cloth, a vignette, a vortex.
