Friday, June 15, 2007

EMPTY DRAWING ROOM


Jorge Luis Borges on the gap between the photograph's deceptive and fading poignancy, and the vibrancy of even the most mundane present moment - the void between appearances and actuality:


EMPTY DRAWING ROOM

Amid the brocade's dimness
the mahogany suite continues
its everlasting conversation.
The daguerreotypes tell their lie:
a false nearness
of old age cloistered in a mirror,
and when we look hard they elude us
like pointless dates
of murky anniversaries.
With a blurred gesture
their anxious almost-voice
runs after our souls
more than half a century late
and there it's scarcely reached
the first mornings of our childhood.
Actuality, ceaseless
ruddy, and beyond doubt,
celebrates in the street's traffic
its unassailable abundance
of present apotheosis,
while the light
slices through the windowpanes
and humbles the senile armchairs
and corners and strangles
the shriveled voice
of these ancestors


Jorge Luis Borges





Well, I have to feature Luis Gottandi's post, because it's almost as poetic as the Borges himself...:

Things conspire to keep us from gawking at the deterministic accident of our lives -- and others'.

The way time folds, like an opening curtain pulled back, from whence the exposure is made until the image is unreadable, or our eyes too gone to read it.

The unspeakable fear so many have that perhaps this is not so egalitarian, and that who we are might define the horizon line of what we can see, that maybe talent cuts education, and salesmanship trumps all the other suites.

Or it could be that we will find out that Atget froze to death in a drawer... Brady died penniless, without any of his pictures...Francesca Woodman walked into thin air at 22...as an old man, Stieglitz wondered one afternoon how long he would have to go without eating so he could afford a copy of The Steerage again. He died without one.

The vacant bliss of sticking strictly to the images and a gunslinger mentality can not be underestimated.

--- Luis

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is interesting to note how little people want to know about the lives of their favourite photographers. Among poets, even the reclusive Emilys who barely publish a word during their lifetimes get those same lifetimes pored over obsessively, and the world rejoices when the number of known photographs doubles from one to two.

Weston is perhaps the only exemplar in photography. Even paparazzi don't get followed around by paparazzi.

Struan

Luis said...

Things conspire to keep us from gawking at the deterministic accident of our lives -- and others'.

The way time folds, like an opening curtain pulled back, from whence the exposure is made until the image is unreadable, or our eyes too gone to read it.

The unspeakable fear so many have that perhaps this is not so egalitarian, and that who we are might define the horizon line of what we can see, that maybe talent cuts education, and salesmanship trumps all the other suites.

Or it could be that we will find out that Atget froze to death in a drawer... Brady died penniless, without any of his pictures...Francesca Woodman walked into thin air at 22...as an old man, Stieglitz wondered one afternoon how long he would have to go without eating so he could afford a copy of The Steerage again. He died without one.

The vacant bliss of sticking strictly to the images and a gunslinger mentality can not be underestimated.

--- Luis