photography (far)
The Liminal Zone: Iceland as liminal space.
"The end of the sea could not be seen. Iceland was all alone in it, with the exception of a single tall narrow iceberg, itself an island or lost column." William T. Vollmann, The Ice-Shirt
"Poor travelers, I thought, seeing myself among them: always somewhere else." W.G.Sebald, Vertigo
House of the Dead: In August 2001, my wife and I traveled to the former Soviet Union to adopt two children from an orphanage in Siberia. On arriving, we found a Russian landscape marked by contradiction and impermanence, in which traces of histories realigned and juxtaposed in an unstable geography of memory and ruins.
"Beyond the gate was the bright world of freedom where people lived like everyone else. But to those on this side of the enclosure that world seemed like some unattainable fairyland. Here was our own world, unlike anything else; here were our own laws, our own dress, our own manners and customs, here was the house of the living dead, a life like none other upon earth, and people who were special, set apart." Fyodor Dostoyevsky, House of the Dead
Ordinary Landscapes: a document of Pleasant Prairie Wisconsin, an incorporated village, simultaneously rural, small town and suburban--where I lived until I was 14 years old--considering the prairie and what has grown out of it.
The Biography of Landscape: a photographic collaboration with Prof. Barb Willard, investigating the human story that has been "written" into the landscape of Chicago's Jackson Park, contemporary views of the site of the World Columbian Exhibition of 1893.
Terrain Vague: The term terrain vague refers to ambiguous, ignored, often forgotten sites; liminal spaces with imprecise limits, voids in which interactions between shifting and occupying forces create disarray, fragmentation and convergences such that vagueness occurs.
Shiqiperise: views of southern Albania.
Return to Island: It was not until the IcelandAir jet began backing away from the jetty and slowly taxiing down the runway that it became real that I was, indeed, finally returning. Though I had left nearly 15 years earlier, Iceland had never really left me.
One is almost cartographic: two peaks separated by a fjord. A small place of refuge above the treeline, the other deserted. Always a trip down or a trip up – departing or arriving. Or, simply, seen from afar.
More common, though, Iceland is accessible by a short boardwalk connecting the place of the everyday to the white, smooth island barely separated, tantalizingly close. But most often seen through observation windows below water level or from a sidewalk along the edge. Always just out of reach.
Iceland is pure sublime. Burke describes the sublime as an obscurity – dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, a place of vastness and blackness. For Burke, the sublime is connected to place. (Kant, however suggested a temporal aspect to the sublime as well: “A long duration is sublime.”)
Icelanders refer to “the quake zone,” “the wasteland” that is the Interior, “the rift.” Abyss, void, fissure – the sublime as experience of the formless, a monochromatic blur of the not there. Essential liminality and uncanniness: opaque and forgotten. Nowhere.
Arrival at Keflavik to a nearly deserted airport at 6:00am. Baggage claim – customs and passport control – money exchange – ground transportation. Dawn barely breaking – cold, wet, overcast. The gray volcanic landscape surrounds and swallows me.
Geographies of the Holocaust: aposiopesis: a form of omission that leaves out what is most important; a sudden breaking off in the midst of a sentence, as if from the inability or unwillingness to proceed; a becoming silent.
“The absence of representable content does not mean the absence of an event . . . the work of figurability is to make contact in this void with that which is not representable.” Michael Parsons
“It was far away, in the back of beyond, in Poland.” Rudolf Hoess
The City in the City: an incomplete photographic archive of Budapest’s “yellow-star” houses, the dispersed Jewish ghetto of 1944.
“Spatial expressions of exclusion . . . show a concern with the creation of real and imaginary spaces and places that in one sense or another are deemed to be beyond the pale . . . a drawing up and policing of boundaries and borders . . . [that] points to a need to focus upon the imaginary or real boundary and policing of that boundary.” Tim Cole, Holocaust City
“It is said that premises retain some stamp, however faint, of their previous inhabitants. . . I have a sense of absence, of emptiness, whenever I find myself in a place where they have lived.” Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder
“we’ve reached 10,000 feet”: somewhere between Chicago and Salt Lake City, July 2018.
The English Sky:
“I took my loved one to a big field/so we could watch the English sky.” John Lennon, Well, Well, Well
In den Freud Museen: Before leaving Vienna, Freud agreed to having his living and working spaces photographed, aware that “some day these photographs might be the only record available,” such that “a museum can be created when the storm of the years is over.” In May 1938, Edmund Engleman, a young Jewish photographer, made several clandestine visits to 19 Berggasse, creating some 150 negatives. Thus, 19 Berggasse now remains largely devoid of Freud’s objects and antiquities. The viewer is, instead, confronted with representations. Enlargements of Engleman’s images fill and “recreate” the space, retellings of past moments, “seemingly empty, seemingly absent.” Haunted,like the psychoanalytic experience itself.
The family settled in London, at 20 Maresfield Gardens, “our last address on this planet,” as Freud wrote, dying 15 months after moving to England, in September 1939. Freud’s objects today reside there still. The spaces of the Freud Museum are kept as Freud left them, as if the professor had just stepped away for a few minutes and will return shortly. . .
in Erinnerung, Edmund Engleman
Hotel Empire: walking in the city.
“Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within. . . By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things, to be nowhere.” Paul Auster, City of Glass
Acadie:
“From the window on the fleuve St. Laurent
many sails are blowing over Fleur de lis.
And it’s no surprise to us the gentils gens,
that the British have come now for Acadie.”
Daniel Lanois, Acadie
saudade: Though often translated as nostalgia or solitude, saudade is a word with no exact translation outside of Portuguese, but can be thought of as a state of profound melancholic longing for that which is - or for the one who is - absent. Or a longing for what never was. Saudade is a kind of unfocused sadness or incompleteness, a vague and constant desire for something other than the present; memories of distant people or things lost and the elusive recollection of feelings . . . As one wrote, “Perhaps saudade is another name for love, [its] concretization through absence.”
. . . saudade is yearning: yearning for something so indefinite as to be indefineable: an unrestrained indulgence in yearning . . . implied in the lilting measures of the fado, in its languid triplets and, as it were, drooping cadences. Richard Elliott, Fado and the Place of Longing,
photography (near)
Arkheion: "The word archive is derived from the French archives, in turn from Latin archīum or archīvum, which is the romanized form of the Greek arkheion: 'public records, town-hall, residence, or office of chief magistrates.' Arkheion originally referred to the home or dwelling of the Archon, in which important official state documents were filed and interpreted under the authority of the Archon."
Compossible: considering the inherent latency of the photographic image: as fragment of “reality” yet always already laden with ambiguity and meaning in potentia.
Divisar: ". . . from the word divisar, meaning "to gaze at from a distance. . ."
"Suddenly the world around me fell into place. The edges of things suddenly got sharper and brighter. I sat for a long time holding the lens over one eye and closing the other, looking out at the wide view from our house. It was amazing, as if an invisible hand had wiped clean a misted window that had covered the world, revealing it as something new and bright. Despite that, I didn't like it. I was used to looking at the world through a cloud of haze, so that the edges of things ran together and separated freely, not according to any fixed rules." Ismail Kadare, Chronicle in Stone
Mysteries of Domestic Space: a visual translation of Freud’s essay, “The Uncanny.”
The domestic:
At the dawn of the pandemic, as a reaction against being sucked into the zoom-scape, I began photographing with instant films. Instant photographic materials are different, other than both digital and negative processes. They are a direct chemical recording of what was seen. They have their own alchemy, self-generated upon exposure and ejection that renders the image before your very eyes, bypassing the need for a negative first. No negation here, but something which is (on one naïve level) not necessarily more real but . . . closer to the real? But I mention this only as description, not as something that necessarily attracted me. What attracted me to these processes, what resonated with me at the time, was the physicality of the images. In a world in which physical presence suddenly became a danger, something about the instant image spoke to me. Something about their imperfections. While there is something undeniably brute about them – crude, coarse - they are at the same time soft and muted. The colors are pale and dull; the monochromatic images a muddy gray.
This “journal” then, is a witness of my life during the early time of COVID. The Surrealists referred to seeing the familiar, the everyday, the banal in new ways as “the Marvelous.” What was “Marvelous” about my life? What could I now notice about my everyday rituals and actions, seen from a new perspective? How could I photograph what's not there, my past life? What does boredom look like? The virus was unseen to the unaided eye, but its effects were inescapeable.
and when the sky was opened it was blue :
“A child knows what color is meant by the word blue. What he knows here is not all that simple.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (545)
after Four Quartets: apprehend: grasp, perceive, take into custody; expect or anticipate with anxiety, suspicion or fear.
“Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and . . . “
T.S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday
Negations:after Vera Lutter:
“A negative judgement is the intellectual substitute for repression; its ‘no’ is the hall-mark of repression, a certificate of origin - like, let us say, ‘Made in Germany’.” Sigmund Freud, “Negation”
books
Northway: a return.
Waiting: liminal time in a liminal space.
Mysteries of Domestic Space: the font used, "Sigmund Freud Typeface," was developed by Harald Geisler, based on Freud's handwriting.
videos
gheto: Some thoughts on tourism, borders, history, assimilation and foreignness (2006, app. 10 minutes).
The Moments Surrounding: An attempt to express inexpressible grief and overwhelming loss(2010, app. 14 minutes).
Four Short Films: Franz Schubert journeys through Albania (2009, app. 40 minutes).