EActually, I didn’t want a photo at all at first. I thought of a radical gesture – a text without an image – and read the book “Photographs Not Taken” again. The American photographer Alec Soth talks about how he is more of a “traveling” photographer than a “home” photographer, that he has to travel to “find his eyes” and that the most important event of his life, adoption his daughter in Bogotá, was left without a photo. He had set up the camera in the orphanage’s waiting room, and when the nurse came into the room with the child, both parents, he and his wife, stepped out of the frame. This report sounds like a parable, and again I wonder whether photography only represents itself or also the figures of thought in general.
This photo from one of my trips comes from my photo archive. At first I didn’t remember the exact circumstances of its creation. Every now and then I look at old photos on my iPhone. The simple act of snapping photos has created mountains of images that are difficult to explore. The digital archives of our past are larger than our ability to sift through them. It would take so much time that we would need a second life. I often rummage through the photos, there are no “mountains”, and the “burrowing” has also become a metaphor because I just scroll, it requires no physical effort, no tactile encounter with the paper – just reduced finger work on the surface , but not craft. Is everything tactile becoming a tactic these days? The tenderness for strategy?
Tuning fork for an out-of-tune “I”
When grief overwhelms me and I can’t act, I look at the photos on my iPhone. Pure, meditative looking in search of peace and comfort and – perhaps – self-determination, as if looking at the images were a tuning fork for an out-of-tune “I”, a path to autonomy. In the last few weeks I noticed that this habit has turned into an almost obsessive belief that I can find something solid and stable here, as if digital photography would prove to me that the world is still standing, that my world is still standing, as if that were it Seen and snapped a kind of identity, as if I had used it to appropriate the world I love.
This photo stuck with me, even though I don’t have small children or miss this place. A tulip festival was just taking place in this town on Lake Geneva. Hundreds of tulips were planted along the promenade, in all colors and shapes: from thin-skinned white calyxes that glow from within to deeply colored double flowers. Struck by this colorfulness, I went to the lake to “find” my eyes. Then I saw in front of me a father with his daughter at eye level and in front of him another father with his child, further ahead a man with a small child in his hand. It was as if someone had thrown a stone into the water and it bounced across the surface, creating circles. I thought it might be an allegory for something, but I didn’t realize what.
I took a photo and converted it to black and white that same day.
Next to the colorful flowers, the black and white photo looked like a hole in time. A few days ago I fell into this hole. I struggled to understand why this particular image took hold of me and gave me the right to remain silent about current events. I tried to walk the path again, in my mind, and untangle a tangle: the path of this peaceful day, of fathers with children and me, as a secret mother. The photo accommodates the presence of my father and me, my friends who currently have small children. It’s as if I’m following the childhood of my own children here too, and then I see this father with the girl again, who don’t seem to be threatened by war.
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