The bird, the chair, toc went the clock

I first heard of the film “Midnight in Paris” a couple of years ago (Note: if you haven’t seen this movie this post might be a bit of a spoiler. Feel free to skip to the fourth paragraph). At the time I was fascinated by the idea of a Woody Allen and Owen Wilson collaboration. I am a fan of Allen as a director and script writer and Wilson is perfectly likeable even if a little predictable as an actor. What fascinated me about this film was the combination of these two Hollywood pros. I couldn’t imagine it. The two seemed an odd couple and incompatible in their outlook on life; at least in as much as what I knew about them. In any case, after first reading about this film I didn’t seek out any previews or synopsis (as I normally do) so that when I finally got to see it a few months ago, its plot came as a total surprise. I could say that I was blown away as I watched Wilson’s character travel back to the 1920’s in Paris. I felt like I was seeing my own fantasy acted out in front of me. My favourite city in my favourite era with my favourite artists. All of it put together so beautifully by Allen’s masterful direction and Wilson’s infectious charm and charisma.

It’s a fanciful story with a moral which Owen Wilson’s character realises towards the end of the movie; wishing to be somewhere else in some other time, is missing the point where happiness is concerned and in the end will get you nowhere. I already knew that but I still like to entertain the fantasy of going back in time to sit in Parisian cafes and discuss art and philosophy with Dali, Magritte, Ernst, Buñuel, Sadoul and Man Ray. It’s a fun thing to do if nothing else.

I hold a certain fascination for Surrealism and those who created art of this genre. An argument can be made that all art is created on some sub-conscious level but the Surrealists were the first to take that notion seriously and in the process tried to manifest the sub-conscious in their art. What they tried to do was to go beyond mind and into the reality that the mind tends to filter out. Whether this is what they achieved is open to argument with Freud being one of the early critics of the movement despite the fact that Freud’s work with the unconscious, dream interpretation and free association was regarded as instrumental by the Surrealists in developing ways of freeing the imagination to manifest the sub-conscious. I am under no illusion that “Midnight In Paris” romanticised this epoch in art history just as I tend to do—any artistic genre that has its own manifesto with a publication called “La Révolution surréaliste” is sure to have an agenda that goes beyond pure artistic endeavours.

I don’t understand much about the sub-conscious and all the associated mental concepts that go with it but I do understand about art and creativity coming from somewhere beyond what is generally accepted as conscious thought. In my own experience I would go as far as to say that conscious thought, deliberate thinking, is more likely to hamper the creative process then aid it. Saying this, I do not wish to suggest that I know anything about the surrealist idea of psychic automatism to express the functioning of the mind but there are times, few and far between, when I make an image that seems to solidify what had up to that point, merely been some mental concept floating in my head that I could not pin down.

So this brings me to this particular photo (“The bird, the chair, toc went the clock”) that I made some time back. I was walking around a part of town I hadn’t visited in a long time and I was walking without purpose (a rare thing for me these days). There were a number of furniture stores in the area and I have a fascination with well designed, aesthetically pleasing furniture but that’s another story. I’d been in and out of a few stores when I decided it was time for me to get going when I came across this store window which caught my eye mostly due to a giant mask sitting behind the window pane. After what I had seen that day this particular window display had little going for it beyond this oversized mask staring lifelessly into the void. I felt the need to take a photo of this display but for some reason resisted it. I turned my back on it to cross the street and as I waited to cross I once again felt the urge to take a photo. I turned back, brought up my camera and saw that I was too close and could not fit it all in. My lens was simply not wide enough. Oh well, too bad, I’d tried. I turned once again and with no traffic on the road I started to cross. Half way across the first lane I spun around and took a shot of the store and then stood there in the middle of the road wondering what had just happened. It was the sound of oncoming traffic that woke me out of my reverie and had me dash across to the safety of the opposite footpath. I didn’t think about it again until a few days later when I was looking at the images on my computer (the original photograph is at the end of this post).

There was a giant mask similar to the smaller ones found in Venice but without the feathers or frills. Looking at the image more closely however, I realised it wasn’t the mask which grabbed my attention. It was a combination of many things which somehow mashed into a strangely holistic picture. There was the mask of course but also a chair and other bits and pieces, and then there was a row of old buildings which were merely reflected in the glass but seemed to be integral to the image that I saw. As my eyes wondered around the image memories sprang up out of the past and into the present moment all of them linked to me and my story of course since they were my memories. It seemed as if I could relate every aspect of this image to something in my life. Past and present. This isn’t necessarily weird or unusual but it was an interesting feeling. Just as I was digesting this I saw my reflection in the glass. There I was, taking the picture, a faint reflection lost in the bigger picture but somehow significant. Or not. I wasn’t sure. Then with my cursor hovering over the delete button (it wasn’t much of a photo as far as photos go) something happened… I saw me. I don’t mean the reflection of me but me as if the image was a self-portrait. Perhaps the best I had ever taken (which, I grant you, isn’t saying much).

Lucian Freud (grandson of Sigmund Freud) once said that “everything is autobiographical and everything is a portrait, even if it is a chair.” This is a sentiment I’ve held for a long time (and touched upon in previous posts) but only really felt in my core as I worked on this photograph. As photographers, endlessly recording the outward appearance of things around us, we are inadvertently revealing something about ourselves every time we click the shutter, every time we dodge, burn, manipulate, texturize, perhaps even when we apply an instagram filter. Or not. I can’t speak for everyone but I have often thought that this was the case with my own photography. As I worked on this photograph, dodging, burning, manipulating, adding some elements to further tie the memories together, I realised the full truth of it. This photo is a portrait. It says something about me even if it is not fully apparent to anyone else.

I follow a number of photographers, some of whom are listed on this blog, and even though I have never met any of them beyond the virtual confines of the Internet I feel like I know them. I have built up this knowledge in part from their words on their blogs but primarily from their photographic work. Like I said, I have long felt like Lucian Freud, that creative work is autobiographical in nature. So in theory I could meet up with any of these people, in real life, and immediately feel like I’ve known them for a long time.

In theory.

One day, if life allows, I plan to buy a round-the-world ticket and put my theory to the test.

A moment in Life

On this day, the first day of Autumn,

I sit and ponder without melancholy or regret,

the life which I call my own.

As I approach the autumn of my life,

to borrow a metaphor from the ever insightful Shakespeare,

it becomes increasingly clear how short one’s life truly is.

Life itself, however, is eternal

and there is much comfort to be gained from that knowing.

That which I take to be my life

resonates as but a moment

in that which remains timeless.

A portrait of self

The self-portrait is an interesting photographic concept. One with which I struggle a little. Not out of shyness or self-consciousness or anything ego-centric. My struggle lies with the definition of “self-portrait” and with it’s purpose.

I should state at this point that I regard portrait photography as the single most difficult type of photography I’ve tried my hand at. I say this because there’s a lot of emotional baggage attached to most people, baggage that makes up a persons nature, baggage that filters their perception of the world they see. There’s also strong attachment to the belief that this body-mind mechanism is who we are, that it is all we are. When making a portrait I feel the need to bring all this out. If I take someones photo I want it to be about their perceived nature or my own perception of their nature, ultimately I’d like it to be about their true nature. I don’t want it to be just about their physical appearance. The physical may well be what draws me in but I do think that it’s how well a portrait captures the person’s inner essence, that which lies beneath the outer, that gets me hooked. It is this skill that I would like to develop.

Anyway, back to the self-portrait. A self-portrait is defined as:

self-por·trait (sělf’pôr’trĭt, -trāt’, -pōr’-)
n.   A pictorial or literary portrait of oneself, created by oneself.

Ok. It’s a definition. It tells us what it is. So my self-portrait is a portrait of myself, created by myself. But since I have trouble defining my self I’m still at a loss as to what a self-portrait should be. If I can’t define where I start and where I end, of what exactly, will the portrait be? Who or what exactly, will be creating it? But I suspect those questions are unimportant to anyone but me so let’s accept that definition and explore the possible purpose of self-portraiture.

Supposedly Albrecht Dürer was the first artist to regularly do self-portraits. Cézanne painted or drew at least 60 of them. Frida Kahlo painted 55 of them, Rembrant painted, drew or etched close to a hundred and Vincent van Goth painted 25 of them, most of them in the last two years of his life. Even Andy Warhol did his fair share of them. I don’t recall reading anywhere if any of them ever defined what a self-portrait was. I don’t know if they ever so much as explained why they felt the need to do portraits of themselves. The reason of course could be simply a case of not having a model on hand and resorting to working with their own image. Considering the calibre of the afore mentioned artists I feel that the reason why may not be so simple and that the definition may be as varied as the personalities involved.

Jacob Rosenberg, in a 1948 monograph on Rembrandt, describes the artist’s self-portraits as showing “a gradual change from outward description and characterisation to the most penetrating self-analysis and self-contemplation. … Rembrandt seems to have felt that he had to know himself if he wished to penetrate the problem of man’s inner life.”

With over 90 self-portraits starting from the outset of his career in the 1620s to the year of his death in 1669, it is said that Rembrandt created “an autobiography in art that is the equal of the finest ever produced in literature even of the intimately analytical Confessions of St. Augustine.” So again (as mentioned in my previous post) we have images, paintings and drawings in this case, that tell a story, a story of one man. A story that Rembrandt may have created for his own sake, to understand his own “inner life”. That is a reason for self-portraiture that I can work with. While I cannot deny my existence I can, and do, question my perception of my existence. And a portrait of self when done with the right mind set, with what I call no-mind, that is without pre-conceived ideas, without ego, may well reveal the “inner life”, the “one” self. I say “may” because I don’t know but for me, it is worth the exploration.

Some famous portraits of self.

Self Portrait with Cropped Hair - by Frida Kahlo

Self Portrait - by Vincent van Gogh

Self-Portrait with Camouflage - by Andy Warhol

Self Portrait - by Pablo Picasso

Self-portrait - by Vincent Van Gogh

Albrecht Dürer's last self-portrait, unmistakably Christ-like.

Self-portrait - by El Lissitsky

Self-portrait - by Lucas Samaras