The violinist doesn't need light or breaks - passion embraces his and he spins through the crowds and the gypsy music engulfs the square of obeliscs and goths into a fiery sound.
emotions
{Project "52"} Week 16
It is spring and the cliche of love all around is biting even the youngest ones!
{Project "52"} Week 15
It is on a Saturday that the city buzzes with anticipation - the trains come and go, the crowd moves in a newly week-end rhythm, the music of the street musicians can be enjoyed. We walk through the city in a daze of happiness and sorrow - we want to experience every bit of it to the fullest. Time will fly by but we have no watches. And what we have is a treasured moment in between a gap on a train timetable.
Living alone and Brussels [on compassion]
in Photography, Thoughts
A couple of months ago, a story began. Many stories begin at any given point in time but we rarely know how the story goes on - like the 1001 nights stories - never ending escape and imprisonment. There are stories you would tell in loud voice, in front of people, without fear of rejection, without being laughed at but with a laugh, stories of mystery and mysticism, stories of complicated plots and characters, stories of linear plots and simple characters ...
I was travelling in Amsterdam when a story began. It had been incubating for a while as all stories do - they are collection of light rays scattered randomly, waiting for that perfect glass element that will focus them at the right time, on the right plain. They are just the continuation of past stories - stories scattered when they reached an end of a path, a wall, a mirror.
Today, walking the streets of Brussels, the story comes to a next chapter. Today, living alone is not something to avoid - one must get out of one's own imaginary shell - a shell that does not even exist - and walk into the guarded garden of common-hood.
Living alone is not about confusion or loneliness or isolation. Living alone is about enlightenment and freedom. I still do not know where the boundaries of my "self" are, I still look to others with uncertainty, I still define my "self" by the environment and by the boundaries of the "other". I still look for the microphone pointed at me (rather than at the important person in the middle of the square), and I still exchange a smile with the chocolate-drugged teenagers, and I know that the colourful clothing is just a scream "this is me, here! stay back and go find YOUR color!".
I removed the headphones - I wanted to hear the city and the people; I walked the streets, slowly; I looked like a tourist with a camera hanging on my neck (and on Sunday, that's all that Brussels is about); I used the camera as an eyelid - to wink, to show the others that I am one of them smirking shyly at the peeing boy. And that's not loneliness, nor isolation, nor confusion.
This is empathy and compassion. This is the power to feel anyone, to be anyone, to define your "self" as someone you admire, to shy away from the world when you want, and to help the shy away from shyness, to morph and be morphed, to adapt and be adaptable. In today's culture, we are lead to believe that knowing who you are, and being yourself is a good thing. And yet, we are criticsed for "having changed", for no longer "understanding", for "being stubborn". I do want to change and to adapt, and to mend, and meld and mold. And living alone helps me expand like water and air - filling the voids in between the others whenever necessary, wherever left.
Photography is History
in Photography, Thoughts
For well-over a month now, I've been using quite extensively the new Voithländer 35 mm f1.2 II lens. It is a superb lens - it is sharp, it is great to handle, it offers light sensitivity unbeatable in the 35 mm range, and fantastic contrast and color rendition. It is a fantastic black-and-white lens especially when paired up with the Leica M8's infrared sensitivity. And it made me think about what the lenses tell about the picture.
We've often read about lenses that render vintage, or modern, or clinical, or that are great for color, or that offer surreal rendition, etc. The lenses that we use (figuratively and literally) create their own reality and have their own feel. That's what we refer to "vintage" when we talk about softer lenses. We use them because they capture our own expectation of the world back in those days - ghostly and desaturated. They have melancholic value because we want to live in that world - some of us, anyway. Their low contrast is for us a summary of a historic moment - calmed down, poised, and sometimes flatly boring. We become like the characters in "Midnight in Paris" who cannot live in their own time and look for a future or a past.
The lens is more than just a brush in the hands of the photographer. The lens is the intermediary inner eye, the intuition and the impulse. It is the brush but also the canvas on which we draw with light. It is the paint and the palette. With a manual focus lens, the photographer is in absolute control of how impressionistic, Cezannian, Bensonian, Cartier-Bressonian, etc. the composition and appearance would be. Super-f lenses, opened to the fullest, gather light that can easily overwhelm the sensor – like a bucket of pain splashed on the canvas. These lensed are made for drawing at night – when each photon matters, when the human eye is not capable of seeing colors, and when people open up to you - by the fireplace, with a candle, under the fireworks.
Then we have a whole new world before our eyes. Colors and colorful people. Smiles and tears. Music and noise (no silence ever). Breath and stank. Toxicity and invigoration. Poets and lyrics. Begging for money and satisfaction without greed. Being of past, and present, and future. A Prokofiev and a Rachmaninov piano concerto – Bach doesn't fit at night but the Russian romantics and surrealists do.
We are drawn to that world, as photographers. It is revealing, it is unseen. It is a secret. Perhaps, its allure is in its invisibility. Or maybe, photography is just the artist's attempt at escaping death, which often comes at night, in the dark, without us seeing. We all want our picture taken, our presence documented, our loved by our side. The fear of perpetual neglect is what has driven the artist for centuries. So what's so new with photography? Infinite reproducibility? And isn't it through photography that we try to live in another age? To move to the times which we like - recreating the ages, recreating the clothes, the make-up, recreate the greatest and most beautiful era. But isn't any one of them like that? Aren't we all trying to escape the present?
But life is a little unsatisfying. And that's why we need to document each and every part of it - the happy parts and the sad parts, the ones we want to forget and the ones we want to remember forever. But above all, we must document the ones we want to live in.
