#prabhakarkafle

The calmness of Blue

The color blue signifies a sense of coolness and distance. Rebecca Solnit evokes this effect of blue in her essay The Blue of Distance. Reading the essay teleports the reader back to a time when Salt Lake still had water. A scene forms in the reader's mind. The sky is clear blue with a few stars and a clear bright crescent moon just rising over the horizon. You can see the reflection of the moon in the dark blue water of the lake which extends for miles to the horizon where it meets the sky. The author is walking, not on damp sand, but in knee-deep water in the lake at night. Everything is calm like the color blue.

TS Eliot’s most famous poem The WasteLand is a commentary on the modern society. Throughout the poem, he draws upon the readers' imagination evoking imageries to comment on the isolation and alienation of modern life. The poem is full of scenes from everyday life.

The poem starts with an image of a female character remembering going sledding with her cousin when they were children. Life has changed for her as she grows up and she is sad at the loss of this human connection. Eliot uses another imagery of one only being able to see one’s own shadows and nothing beyond that to signify this isolation. This same emotion is evoked by another imagery later in the first part of the poem of countless people walking across the London Bridge looking down at their own feet.

During the mid-20th century photos and photo-magazines were popular forms of media. Among them, Life Magazine was the most popular. It is estimated to have reached a quarter of the American population regularly. As such, they yielded great power. From what I saw in the exhibition, the publishers and editors of Life were aware of this power and the responsibility that came with it. This can be seen since the start of the magazine's prospectus. “Pictures have become a dynamic power in the Fourth Estate of the 20th century,” they understand. This awareness and thoughtfulness is seen repeatedly during the time the magazine was active. Notably when making decisions about publishing controversial images, like that of the Holocaust.

Prospectus, Life Magazine

Life's stance on Publishing Holocaust Photographs

From the exhibition, Alfredo Jaar’s works stuck out the most to me; his ”The Silence of Nduwayezu” is one of the most powerful artforms I have seen. I had heard about the event tragic Rwandan genocide before and the fact that around a million people died during that. But Jaar’s work gives a soul to that number. He lays out 1 million slides on a light table where each slide has a translucent picture of a kid’s eyes. ‘Eyes are the window to the soul,’ they say, and looking into these slides with a magnifier, one looks into the eyes of a kid who saw his parents killed before his own eyes. And presenting a million of these eyes, and thus stories, is a powerful way of depicting the scale and extent of the tragedy which just saying the number ‘1 million’ cannot justify.

The Silence of Nduwayezu, Alfredo Jaar, 1997

Nothing says only celebrities should be photographed and made posters of. Yet, we do make an unconscious association between the two. In Faces Places, Agnes Varda and JR break this association. The film revolves around stories of ordinary French people and places away from the shiny lights of the cities. They meet people from different ages and modes of life- from a waitress to a farmer to dockers. These stories and people are connected by Agnes and JR’s energy to get to know them, photograph them, and make murals of them. With this, they dissolve the unconscious interconnection between being photographed and celebrity status. In some sense, they immortalize these people in their local community.

In his essay “Notes of a Native Son”, James Baldwin portrays his relationship with his father as a lens to talk about racism. He focuses on two aspects mainly. First, the psychological trauma racism has had on African American people and second, how hard it is to understand the trauma without similar experience and how it could cause distancing, including with family.

Baldwin’s father moved to Harlem from New Orleans. He faced a lot of racism which had an everlasting effect on him- psychologically and socially. Baldwin calls this 'the weight of white people in the world'. It had caused his father to not trust anyone which severely affected his relationship with others including within the family.

I chose to cover Brassai (Gyula Halász) for this assignment. He was born in Hungary and moved to Paris in 1924 where he got involved in the artistic community with the likes of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. I found Brassai’s journey into photography non-traditional, and thus fascinating. Working initially as a journalist who did not like the photographic medium, Brassai got into photography after having to use a camera for one of his assignments.

I looked at Brassai’s works in his arguably most famous book- Paris by Night. The book contains 64 photos he took capturing the nightlife of Paris- from busy streets to empty train stations to night workmen.

Brassai, Paris by Night cover (since the book I got from library just has a green hard binding cover, I got this from the internet)

Night photography can be challenging with an analog camera. Despite that, Brassai’s composition and use of whatever light is available from the street lamps are beautiful. This looks especially mesmerizing in the matte print of the book. Consider the photo of a curved sidewalk below from the book. The framing of the gutter starting from the bottom left and curving in and out just within the frame is pleasing to look at.

Brassai. An open gutter snakes across an empty street. Paris by Night.

In this other photo below, the dispersed light and silhouette of the buildings give a dreamy painting-like look.

Brassai. On the roofs of Paris. Paris by Night.

His photos also show the bustling nightlife of Paris. The medium exposure photo below while the traffic is still but people on sidewalks are moving gives a ghostly appearance to the sidewalks.

Brassai. A glimpse of the Boulevards at the Place de l'Opera. Paris by Night.

He also frames light in his photography to guide the viewer’s eyes along different areas of the image. Below are two excellent examples- one of a bird’s eye view of a traveling fair, and the other of an empty train station with lamps of different brightness.

Brassai. Traveling fairs regale. Paris by Night.

Brassai. last train out. Paris by Night.

And it is not just light, but also the framing of shadows and silhouettes as in the photos below.

Brassai. A young prostitute between Sebasto and the old Beaubourg quarter. Paris by Night.

Brassai. Fire!. Paris by Night.

The first episode of Ways of Seeing by John Berger makes me think about the changing concept of reproducibility in art with technology. Consider forms of art like oil paintings. As Berger talks about, any attempt to reproduce it fails to match because of the fundamental knowledge that only one of the painting was ever painted. Even if the same artist makes a second attempt, it is a different piece of art. But if you consider a more modern form of art, this limitation does not exactly apply. Consider photography. Once the photo is captured in the film or digital sensor, the variables of the scene and the photographer’s vision is frozen. One one can develop multiple copies of it- each representing the same art. Same with other digital arts too.