Saturday, February 17, 2007

A CERTAIN LIGHT

Late summer has come early to the far south of the south.  Already the rays have given up their intensity, the quiet light bringing on the evanescent effervescence of autumn.   Certain qualities of light and shadow have a palpable poignancy.  Giorgio de Chirico found this in “the melancholy of beautiful autumn days, afternoons in Italian cities.”[1]  Captured by painters and photographers this certain light is fleeting yet lingering, embedded in it a singular memory, all memories, a homesickness for a place not known.  Photography is a trapping device, a butterfly net, holding the moment.  Inherently phenomenological, photographs capture light and transform it, shaping, forming.  Roland Barthes reveals this existential moment, recalling Sontag’s words that the photograph would “touch me like the delayed rays of a star,” and that “A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.” [2]  The connection to memory, to that which is ‘dead’ already, Barthes terms, “the melancholy of Photography itself.”[3]  Infused with the ache of absence, photographs of landscape and architecture are portals to fugitive moments, of the melancholy mnemonics captured in filmmaker Chris Marker’s declaration, “I claim, for the image, the humility and powers of a madeleine.”[4] 

The photographer, like the painter, contributes to the rendering of the visible, the moment of melancholy, evoked in Hubert Damisch’s declaration,

It is no accident that the most beautiful photograph so far achieved is possibly the first image Nicephore Niepce fixed in 1822, on the glass of the camera obscura - a fragile, threatened image, so close in organization, its granular texture, and its emergent aspect, to certain Seurats - an incomparable image which makes one dream of a photograph substance distinct from subject matter, and of an art in which light creates its own metaphor.[5]

This resonates strongly with Jean-Luc Marion’s revelations regarding the painter of ‘authentic’ images, “He deepens a seam or fault line, in the night of the inapparent, in order to extract, lovingly or more often by force, with strokes and patches of color, blocks of the visible.”[6]   Melancholy is infused with memory, and the poignancy of loss, of the unattainable presences of the past.  Tonino Guerra, remembering travels with Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky through Italy, wrote “I remember when we entered the little church on the edge of the water-filled square, where the mist rising from the water gave a sense of distance to the landscape of ancient houses.  The warm light that morning streamed through the dusty windows and came to rest on faded decorations on a wall.  He surprised me sitting on a pew, as though I were just the right shadow to accentuate the caress of the sun beyond my dark body. These images leave with us a mysterious and poetic sensation, the melancholy of seeing things for the last time.”[7]

Andrei Tarkovsky, Bagno Vignoni, (1979-1982) from Giovanni Chiaramonte and Andrey A Tarkovsky (eds),  Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids  (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 9

[1] Giorgio de Chirico, The Memoires of Giorgio de Chirico (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 61.

[2] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (London: Fontana, 1984.  Originally La Chambre Claire, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1980), 80.

[3] Ibid., 79.

[4] Chris Marker, Immemory, (CD ROM) (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2002).

[5] Hubert Damisch,  “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image,”  October, Vol. 5, Summer (1978): 70-72, 72.

[6] Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 25.

[7  Tonino Guerra, ‘A Fond Farewell', in Giovanni Chiaramonte and Andrey A Tarkovsky (eds),  Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids  (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 9.

 

 

 

 

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