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Zapatistas
en marcha del Día Internacional de la Mujer, ,
San Cristobal de las Casas, 1996 © Frida Hartz
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In
the photograph (from the point of view of the looks), you see
transparent palimpsests reflected in the opaque body of the
referent. The eye of the photographer sees through light —by
means of light— but also through lens, and selects what
he sees, but the camera, as an intermediary for the eye, sees
what it can catch, depending on the technical quality of its
devices. Finally, eyes, removed from the primary process of
reception, see, in turn, what they can and desire to see in
the recomposition of the object they receive perceive?, through
their own hermeneutics as applied to the object. Normal fiction
is that we all see the same thing (the photographer, the camera
and the observer), but in reality there are subtle variables
on what is captured and each one sees something different.
Let’s say that the photographer want to capture the image
in a mirror of a young man who crosses a puddle, which serves
as a reflecting pool (it captures him), but at the same time
the camera goes even further and duplicates a flying buttress
from which a streeplamp. Is hanging, with its transparent bombilla
looks decapitated, something that possibly exists has been captured,
but not necessarily intentionally, and for the person who looks
at the photograph, the flying buttress looks like the walking
stick of a pope in an umbrella stand of a geometric structure
that turns a building into a walking stick stand. Who was behind
all these messages?
The imperfect analogy (framing, size, contrast, color, model)
is certainly what defines the object to be photographed by recognition
and remains frozen —not necessarily static— with appeals
for meaning, but since there is no fragmentation of the sign
in linguistic duality, the code is not complete, it only remains
on the visual continuum iconically interrelated. “And thus
it is developed, explains Roland Barthes, the particular statue
of a photographic image: a message with no code. From this proposition
it is unpredictable to immediately deduce an important corollary:
a photographic message is a continuous message! 1
In spite of a lack of common understanding (the absence of a
strict codification, let’s say biunivocal), there are more
superimposed messages on top of an analogical reproduction of
reality —a reality which in reality is nothing more than
what the photograph itself represents, but in the recipient
it unfolds as a secondary sense of “treatment” given
to an image under creative action, which brings back to the
cultural horizon of the society that receives the message permeated
by ideology. This is a socialized ideology if the theme prevails,
but an aestheric one if form is accentuated.
This overlapping of what the photographer is after with the
spectator would lead us perhaps, to “read in the photograph
the myths of photography, fraternizing with them (…). These
myths tend obviously (that’s what myths are for) to reconcile
photography and society”. 2 For
Roland Barthes this is studium, but punctum, which is there
objectively, represents an emotional displacement from the recipient’s
point of view, which in another way constitutes the center of
interest in the iconic document. It would seem that the punctum
greets us as a perturbing element. “The punctum of a photo
is that chance that it might impress me (but which also hurts
me, it pierces me)”. 3
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Bebedor
de pulque, Llanos de Apan, 1978
© Christa Cowrie
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A
strange combination of this “visual thinking”, as
Rudolf Arnheim calls it is what finally allows us to determine
a “photographic style”. This ontology of a half-sought
after and half-seen role, especially constructed through the
efforts of the artist’s eye simultaneously tied to his
limbic brain (site of emotional images) and the reasoning cortex
that organizes cultural analogies between the referent and the
object created, is what makes sense of it (in search of codes
of relationship) to the spaces approached by a reading of it.
If in these approximations there is a minimum unit of meaning,
this does not reside in an indecipherable iconeme, but rather
in the cultural relationship itself. It is not at all easy for
this continuous search to occur, and it cannot take place with
a pure overlapping of primary symbolic connotations, but rather
has to occur within a space of cultural closeness.
The click of a camera sets off theory and polemics: the artist
performs, he doesn’t necessarily form hypotheses. Criticism
of representation should reconstruct the hypotexts of all these
overlapping visions, which specify the analytics of the created
product. The handling of the visual material is not then a simple
representation of images in which ideas are caught, “just
like you catch a common cold”, 4 but it
requires a methodical and rigorous visual culture. The network
of visual relations constitutes the iconicity of the system
and that seems to be what determines style.
In Christa Cowrie’s materials (Hamburg, 1949) and Frida
Hartz’ (Mexico, 1960), what interests me is not so much
the themes of their photographs with regard to the relationship
formulae of iconic syntax, or the approximation of plastic masses
and the ensuing form of dialogue with resignification in the
cultural reception process, but what is truly important is to
determine some forms of expressiveness that in both will be
a way of approaching their trade and the art of creative reproduction
(or reproductive creation); art and trade because they are tejné
and poiesis of images, no matter how far removed we are from
dictionaries and encyclopedias that deal with the hard matrix
of the linguistic sign. But we are close to a semiosis of cultural
relations with their own idiolects. Their styles are similar
due to their training in journalistic reporting, but distant
in their reproductive strategies of photographic objects.
In Christa Cowrie’s work the impregnant moment of a central
image, preferably on a flat background (dark or low light intensity)is
evident: an indian woman with a flag in the background) where
the inner action is detained and the next one is new: their
figures are born out of an initial movement of time in space
where successive forms potentially remain (the torso modeled
in light and shadows) by Ki Morobushi is a Laocoonte of modern
photography). If his forte is dance (he learned on stage) by
observing, then the theory of sculpture space is Lessing’s.
His plasticism models, in a thousandth of a second, a kind of
visual expressiveness that goes through metonymic syntheses,
where cause is effect or viceversa: is it distance that creates
the effect of a look, or is it the look that creates the space
between the eye that sees and is seen? The “instant when
one can no longer be analytic” is the moment of transmigration,
of transnomination to the synthetic block, a type of expresiveness
somewhat declamatory and dramatic, when the acids bite the line
and eats away the benefit of the sculpture about to walk, where
the negatives on the tray begin to roll.
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Tarahumara
cargando leña, Chihuahua, 1984©
Christa Cowrie
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We
are trying to find some constant features in form and not just
pure praise for themes. Perhaps, in this rhetoric on visual
coincidences we find the possibilities of a graphic document
which seeks its style hidden in repetition. I am writing with
the visual memory of a journalistic witness and a few reproductions
on hand. The rest would be to invent Christa and the subtle
espionage of her style.
Frida Hartz is the same thing yet different. The same in the
sense of her trade. The recta ratio fuctibilium as a simple
way of doing things better, but completely different in procedures,
because she seems to work, contrario sensu by analytical approaches
in which the relationship of her plastic masses determine the
visual effect of her ensembles. In her figures pain turned into
plasticism isn’t felt in an isolated manner, but in the
collectivization of contrasts, at times pure dialectic duality
of complementary expressions in transit.
I will attempt to explain myself better through an example:
in Frida’s photographs an image only makes full sense with
the duplicity of a smaller replica that forms part of the ensemble,
yet it constitutes a contrast and a difference. It is not possible
to separate one image from the other in the visual field without
the iconic structure suffering a loss of meaning (the face of
an old indian mother holding the face of a child in the upper
photo; the face of a young indian mother holding a doll in the
lower photo). In both pictures there is an exchange of looks
in the formation of the plastic object, but the same visual
projections reveal the representamen on two planes. The shot
of the old indian woman deepens the inner reality of the photograph.
Her pain is not separate from the event (the frown on her forehead,
her eyes half closed, her mouth half way open as if she had
a dental hurt), while in the second picture the thoughtless
look of the child projected outside the maternal reality plane
—project solidarity— in a vacuum of seeing without
seeing. Sadness is a common feature, but their looks make them
unrelated.
The same thing happens structurally with the exchange of looks
in the other photograph where the young indian mother looks
inward to her own reality as captured by the camera, she becomes
inflexible as she looks within herself, up to down. The doll,
without looking, is turned upwards, with soulless glass eyes
and appears to be thoughtless as inanimate objects are, yet
she is solidary with the plastic object lost in emptiness. Can
you see the beauty of the captured referent which later will
be expressed with the autonomy of being put on paper, reproducing
itself as a meaningful object to become eternal on the plate?
Also present is the fierce wound which unites this spellbound
pain with the half-opend mouth as traslation of a dental human
pain.
The frequent theme is solidary pain which is in contact with
the extradiegetic recipient: but solidarity is in the construct
of the object, which holds onto homogeneous plans and only becomes
unstuck when the spectator is the reflected theme: the hands
of a third photograph cover the pain (fingers molded in a Guayasamín
painting); but we are dealing with pain which is obvious in
the faces sculptured in stone with overexposed lighting, which
then become contrasting shadows: they see us outside of photograph.
Fatigued eyes, hands that point to an exterior plastic space
where the woman in the second picture acts as a witness to the
first, and without which deitics would lose its efficacy. The
woman seated with her legs open under her skirt is an exception,
one in which the procedure is not lost a piece of cloth —a
falcon hood— covers her head, yet a complete lack of gestures
does not hide a fluttering look, which cannot be more than the
remains of a look. Her solitude would be perfect if that perfection
did not come from another desolate solitude that surrounds her
as an oppressive atmosphere.
In this and in many other revelations by Frida Hartz we find
the craftiness of a trade whose rhetorics become complicated
and are clarified through analytical approaches. We have chosen
the least sociological images (those which are semiotically
more dense) because they universalize the iconic procedure in
the darkroom where we see the negative of the obvious and the
obtuse.
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Habitante
de Nueva Jerusalém, Michoacán, 1995
© Frida Hartz
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The
antithesis between the rationality of language and affection
of images is today still a matter of debate. Privileges strain
the discussion. We are barely at the descriptive semiotic level
of the photographic fact (and also film and pictures): at the
indecisive borderline of an artistic tejné that is still
more theory than science. Critical methodology is approached
in gradual feints, not to see it in this light would be pure
pedantry. What does appear to be certain is that “what
defines language is not what is said, but the way it is said”.
5 The same things happen with image
semiotics, what has been called “the iconic sign”
or “plastic, film or photographic language”. These
are precise fields that exclude all critical impressionism.
We also need to warn about the metaphoric use of these terms.
According to Barthes, the “mythological” order is
from his point of view “a feat.“ There are options
that we elect as expressions that later we never provide evidence
for. “Now, all meaning signification (with yet more reason,
all language), implies a very precise structure. We cannot be
content to say that a thing means something without going into
a technique of sense”. 6 However,
this does not exclude testifying over the cultural facts of
our times or describing the marks we see in the butt of the
technological instrument that sustains it. This is the nature
of interactive dialogue. This is what some of Christa Cowrie’s
and Frida Hartz’ photographs suggest to me and in the face
of which caution is detained and audacity encouraged.
Notes
1.- Roland
Barthes, “El mensaje fotográfico” en Lo obvio
y lo obtuso. Imágenes, gestos, voces. Barcelona, Ediciones
Paidós Ibérica, 1992, p. 13.
2.- Roland Barthes. La cámara lúcida. Nota sobre
la fotografía. Barcelona, Ediciones Paidós Ibérica,
1987, p. 67.
3.- Roland Barthes. op. cit., p. 65.
4.- Rudolf Arnheim et al. “El pensamiento visual”
en La educación visual. México, Organización
Editorial Novaro, 1965, p. 4.
5.- Roland Barthes. Civilización de la imagen en la Torre
Eiffel. Textos sobre la imagen. Barcelona, Ediciones Paidós
Ibérica, 2001, p. 49.
6.- Roland Barthes, ibidem.
