Silence and black & white images
Silence is the last thing one would associate with human civilization. It is more easy to link it to nature's expression of her immensity. For this reason one of the first things I've look for in a picture is to see if it talks; I want to put a colour in someone's voice. See if it talks directly to me, so I can understand what is going on and create my own narrative about the story it wants to tell. For Cartier-Bresson it was a 1930s' picture, by Martin Munckácsi (1896-1963), with four boys (c. 1930) running towards Lake Tanganyinka; we can hear the waves crashing down on them. Thus, the first thing I look for in Bogdan Frymorgen' pictures was his voice, I wanted to find Krakow's soundscape. Instead, the only thing I've got was silence. As Frymorgen's wrote about his images that he “filtered out the crowds of tourists and focused on the metaphorical emptiness of the place.” Black and white images that tell a silence story about Krakow in general, and, in particular, from the Jewish Ghetto on the now gentrified Kazimier district.
We are submerged by a vastitude of silence. The same boundless absence of sound that for many decades has characterised any news coming from the other side of the wall. Which, from an Eurocentric (Western) perspective, had prohibit, prevented people from speaking, from having a voice, from being heard – as Hannah Arendt puts it, people must be able to speak to develop a social conscience. The efforts to retain control over peoples destinies in life's melting pot of political affairs in Easter Europe, in post-World War II, seems to bear resemblances to those efforts made a decade before, by Nazi Germany towards the Jewish people. To silence them and undress them from a voice which could question public political decision affecting the social milieux.
In opposition to colour, black & white picture have become to symbolise these people own search, their own feeling of being swept along by powers beyond themselves. With Gerald Howson's photos, although those are black & white images, it is the colour of his voice one hears. When we go through them, we see kids playing and laughing in a derelict field, people shouting out loud what they are selling in the market, and, even, the view from the city centre, taken from above, is full of urban noise of the times immediately after World War II.
Within the western society we are told and taught about the rule of two thirds when conceiving or reading an image; we are told and made aware on the presence of the photographer in the scene, and about all the implications that his or her presence, his or her decision to frame and take a photograph have and implies; we also learn to read from left to right up down the text.
What this milieux doesn't teach us is the contingency on other ways of seeing – beyond what John Berger defends in his book – and in how to read them. What I'm meaning is on what the geocultural influences' determine. For this we have to undress ourselves from all the acquired social cultural capital. And have the strength enough to be open to acquire a new one, while giving to the other permission to attack and plunder what was previously taken for granted and accepted as the ruling principle.
The way an image is read in the Western world is dominated by Alberti's window of optical projection. The one-eye perspective is only one way of seeing, and one that separated us from the rest of the world. Specially, when the world relationships are becoming increasingly borderless, we are confronted, on an everyday base, with images with a moving focus, so they can be read by distinctive people, from distinctive parts of the whole, but, still, keeping the same intention while appealing to different set of geocultural rules.
“By accepting the camera image as real we become oblivious to its limitation. […] I have a reproduction of a Chinese landscape scroll originally painted in 1347. Only details can be reproduced in books as the page turns over on itself and a scroll does not – it unravels. It is not Alberti's window. You are not outside the scene; instead, you take a stroll through a landscape with which you are quite connected. You have many different viewpoints (not just one), as we do if we move through the world.”i
The same basic framework should be applied when reading images “coming”, for instance, from the Middle East, Africa or, even, from Eastern Europe.
“The scroll I have begins with the view looking down on a small village by a lake […]. You then move down to the water's edge, and can look across the lake to the mountains beyond. […] one realised that if there was a vanishing point anywhere it would mean you had stopped moving – that you are not there.”ii
Without realising Frymorgen's photos play around with us and with this way of seeing. If, for example, in the image with the bridge over the Vistula river, where, on the same side of the river, we stand together with Bogdan Frymorgen, our eye would rest on the lower right-hand corner where a man walking while smoking his cigarette; whereas, in the image where a woman follows what could be an organised procession of repetitious figures drawn in to the wall, our eyes would, instead, rest on the lower-left-hand corner, in the black sorrowed female figure. The vision lay to rest in different positions in these two different images. What he states, in his pictures, is that the focus of attention is constantly moving. What constitutes the challenge is not the confrontation of opposites but the mutual antagonisms brought of by those same opposites – Gerald v. Bogdan; West v. East; Post-World War II v. Post-Berlin Wall; Physical v. Virtual; Colour v. Black & White; Colour v. Silence, etc. – and the active and vigorous manner in which they invade one another.
The selected images for this exhibition are first of all a duel of arguments, an affair between two backgrounds; two different ideas about life; two walks-of-life with different interpretations about the same picture, which is then followed by the creation of different stories. Each side emerges from the conflict marked as if by a wound or a depredation. This is one of the reasons why this exhibition, with Bogdan's body of work becomes so challenging. In particular, when coming into a place where the dialogue between his images and those made, almost half-a-century before, by Gerald Howson, come to be involved one with the other. Since both talk to us in different ways about the same territorial story.
© Rui G. Cepeda
London, September 2012
i. Hockney, David (2006) Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the lost techniques of the Old Masters. New and Expanded Edition. London: Thames & Hudson. p. 230.ii. Ibid.Published at VASA-Project: Witness Exhibitions: Witness 2: Photographs: Krakow: Gerald Howson and Bogdan Frymorgen.
