long as the writer is faced with a picture-especially at himself or the work already accomplished a photographer repeats the temptation to put into words the experience. Suddenly the intention involves a frustration similar to that given by a blank page, a cloud or plastic, capricious and abstract, but soon the suggestions of light and time, space and beyond, they begin to take shape when fluids revealed in the dark room under a dim red light of triumph contours slowly, whites and grays and blacks and shadows of a photograph.
The writer puts a phenomenon of memory and time: a board convened in a frozen instant, and at first glance, all the associations (the passage of time, personal identity, the fading of childhood, living with men and women of another century, the survival of extinct beings) who has sought the literature.
No less impressive was the birth of photography (when Nicephore Niepce in 1839 is associated with Daguerre) for writers to painters. His appearance was disturbing that swayed the naturalism of the portrait of the brush and that is called into question the very relation of the novelist-as Balzac and Zola, with "reality." It is believed, as he explained, "a portrait executed by a painter is an interpretation, ie deformation, while a photograph, by contrast, is objective and tells the truth. " Those who have written
best among us, in Mexico on photography have been Octavio Paz and Salvador Elizondo.
In the preface to Instant and disclosure (thirty poems of Octavio Paz and sixty photographs of Manuel Alvarez Bravo), Mexico, 1982, the poet recalls that in 1859 caused amazement in Baudelaire the emergence of photography, which then only attributed a value as a means of propagating the visible reality and scientific information. Baudelaire forgot, Paz writes, that "behind the photographic lens is a man: a sensitivity and imagination. A point of view. " He was considered too about painting, but was then "paint what you see with your eyes closed" to individualized as a distinct art. If the photo
imprisons and stops time, the film "thaw the still image," thinks Paz: "The picture combines subjectivity and objectivity: the world as we see but also viewed from an unexpected angle or a unexpected time. " Because the picture freezes a fragment of reality, is a continuation of the hearing and is, at once, the fixity of the moment, but "it's something he did not see eye or unable to retain memory. The camera is all together, looking eye, preserving memory and imagination composing. Imagine, compose and create verbs are adjacent. For the composition, photography is art. "
As mentioned, one of the most profound and wise meditation that have been expressed in Mexico on the photograph is of Salvador Elizondo. He writes in his essay on Nicephore Niepce, who in 1822 discovered the principles underlying the science and art of photography.
A 180 years away "from the first arrest visible over time, we realize that without the achievements of Niépce the two notions that underpin the political life and respect life in general would be inconceivable: the information and communication.
"Two of the highest offices of state, archiving and propaganda, would be impossible without the discovery of this medium of expression less perfect but more likely that the descriptive writing."
Without the great invention of the nineteenth century had developed nor forensic science, criminology and research, especially in times of war, spying outward and inward: the control of citizens. In his book
Contexts, Salvador Elizondo threads with surgical precision words and not only records the scientists who traveled avatars chemical research to fix the images from the late eighteenth century, also reflects on the photo that has pigmented impregnating the everyday nature of our lives. You can perform a wedding without rings, I seemed to read somewhere, but never without the photo studio. In our innermost vault, the family album, appearing beings who preceded us and trigger the flow of memory. Do not talk to the dead, but we see them in their moment frozen and they see us from that moment in its history. The image of the child we all speak of a death of our middle: the photographic presence of someone who disappeared without dying, the inevitable fading of childhood. "Where is the child I was "asks Pablo Neruda," is still inside me or gone? "It is curious
Elizondo to the production of Niepce and Daguerre: the magnitude of his achievement is only comparable to that of Gutenberg, says Niépce" opposed a temporary dam to channel Heraclitean that somehow allows us to bathe twice in the same river. "
In a tone of In Search of Lost Time, which evokes the man stunned by the living image of the dead, Salvador Elizondo, also the author of Camera Lucida, feels that "our personal pantheons have the form of a photo album and photography only permeates our memory and history where we are located but also the mirror-like Mephistopheles shows Faust doctor Ideal shape and retains the image-is able to show the instant figure, if not the actual presence, in a fleeting, fugitive and ideal. " How
which was considered a diabolical invention would not otherwise color literature and even philosophy? How would not mean changing the combination of the optical properties of the camera with the chemical properties of silver-rooms which culminate in the setting of the image, "if such disclosure refers to the problem of time, memory and death?
The topic can be approached from two perspectives: what the writers have thought about photography and, secondly, the use of photography as a reason or "character" of the stories of not a few novelists and storytellers. We limit ourselves to this second criterion. And it is precisely
Farabeuf or the chronicle of a moment, the novel by Salvador Elizondo, where you see the narrative function that will meet the photograph around a Chinese torture. Chronicle
a moment
"Photography is torture, killing and religious ecstasy, but also surgery and sexual orgasm," writes Dermot F. Curley, the exegete more Highlights of the works of Elizabeth.
is because between the pages of the novel is inserted a photograph of a Chinese torture. The image accompanies and surrounds the text. Falling in the first scene a few coins on a table, producing a slight clinking, clanking small, the narrator refers to the Chinese method of divination using symbolic hexagrams, and someone mumbles the name of "that which is there in the picture , a naked, bleeding, surrounded by onlookers, whose face remains in memory, but whose true identity is forgotten. " From the murky atmosphere that blurred picture that someone, perhaps a former tenant, I forgot in a musty loophole, among the yellowed pages of a book, it triggers an obsessively descriptive prose that seems to emanate from a fixed camera, somewhat like that of Michel Butor in those years (Farabeuf was published in 1965) represented a major influence -much as the other authors of the nouveau roman "in Mexican young novelists of that decade. Farabeuf
aspires therefore to be the story, the chronicle of a moment, the moment of photography. Through the accumulation of images and poetic delight in the technical vocabulary of surgical instruments, the narrator challenges the status untraceable successive, progressive, of written language and insists on the simultaneity of time to get that in any case, could be subdivided into milliseconds. There are crossovers. Everything is interwoven and more than a chronological continuity there is, says Dermot F. Curley, is a series of frozen moments, or rather a moment, one in which Dr. Farabeuf took the picture of Chinese torture.
The photograph is being then the most cruel of memories. Fixing the image on a plate radiate rays of light and shadow, silver chloride which has been subjected to the action of light becomes insoluble in ammonia, and the face is fixed and landscape running back in memory recall a past increasingly remote and endorse our awareness of death.
"Is there anything tougher than memory?"
"The memory is not that time has covered. Beyond the memory execution froze. Therefore, before releasing those tight ropes before unpins unpin as a framework to the whim of the tide, still had entertained a few minutes, he and she to take photographs. He had been photographed from all angles. 'We must help memory', said '... photography is a great invention'. "
is a delight not only in the multiple connotations of the photographs that relate to time, memory and death, but the text itself misses in an effort of writing and style, be like the photograph itself that aims to capture, in one split second can have an instant - the exact time of death of Chinese torture. Wants to focus on a single perceived past and present, not less than the future. The novelist's ambition in this it may be considered as an experimental novel of 1965, bringing the photography and writing.
"Photography," said Dr. Farabeuf-static is a form of immortality. "
" photograph a dying man said Farabeuf-doctor and see what happens. But keep in mind that a dying man is a man in the act of dying and that the act of dying is an act that lasts a moment, therefore, to photograph a dying man needs to shutter trigger precisely photographic section the only moment when a dying man, that is, at the very moment when the man dies. "
If it is a novel about the picture only, the truth is that if something sets the plot of the novel is photography. Relationships and connections that are taking the narrative chain promote, through photography, "a fusion of different times and different spaces in a single moment." (DF Curley)
The invention of the parent
Son of an immigrant Austrian Jew and established in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Samuel Auster Paul Auster's father, plays the central figure of the first part of The Invention of Solitude. Glacial
, paralyzed from the viewpoint of love, gone, as disconnected from life, becomes, in the experience of his son, "an invisible man for himself and others."
If the past is hidden beyond the intellect, material objects, such as Marcel Proust reasoned, the circumstances that triggered the memory of Paul Auster's narrative is given by the vacuum and things that is in the house of his dead father, when he opens his bedroom and searches in your closets, look at the unpainted walls, repairs to broken taps and toilet utensils, and warns that there are still some clothes around her mother because his father, divorced fifteen years ago, clinging to the past and wished to preserve the house as a museum but rather because it was not aware of anything and nothing else mattered, "I ruled the negligence, no memory." The man could not demonstrate. It was capable of a caress. Lived the life of a loner, not as Emerson, which was isolated to meet, not as Jonah prayed to be saved in the belly of the whale that saved him drowning, but in the sense of someone who falls back, which is placed in retreat, not having to see or allow others to see. A man with no appetite. Death in life. The death of desire.
Among the material objects that tell the dead and characterize it as a character, and they do persist in some strange way, photographs shelter for the child the illusion that might reveal a truth largely ignored. The search for the father then becomes inquiry, a question and unheard since childhood.
It is precisely here, when the story involved in photography (including only the English edition of the novel), produced the epiphany, the revelation of the father and his impenetrable personality.
A family group picture freezes since the early twentieth century the image of the grandmother with her five children: a daughter and four children, one of which, the baby of less than a year sitting in the lap of her mother is the narrator's father, Paul Auster. The grandfather, however, is not ... but it was: it was cut by someone in a rude and angry because the picture is broken, torn, pegosteada, so that the bottom is flying without a tree trunk and under the armpits one child poke the tips of the fingers of a non-existent or excluded: the grandfather. This denial does not remain resentful mere metaphysical entelechy photo because, as Paul Auster came to know for a few newspaper clippings, her grandmother killed by a bullet to his grandfather in 1919 in front of one of the boys was holding a candle when her father-grandfather Paul Auster-changing a burned out bulb. In the darkness and gloom. All this was to perceive it in their own way, his two years, Paul's father. The grandmother was jailed after a trial that was brought to older children, but was ultimately acquitted, forced to emigrate to the East Coast.
In another of his novels, Leviathan, Paul Auster thanked the French photographer Sophie Calle to allow him to mix reality with fiction. And indeed, one of the story lines of the novel features the photographer, named Mary, to tell how organized their "projects" from random photo. As is the case that one morning Mary came a day with the idea of \u200b\u200bbuying film for your camera, address book was lying on the ground and picked it up. A bear at the time was aimed to find the whereabouts of each of the names listed on the agenda. I followed. The spying. Tried to guess his occupation and mode of life led from random, ie, photographs.
"Finding out who they begin to learn something about the man who had lost. Absence would be a portrait, a profile drawn around empty space, and little by little background would emerge a figure made up for everything that was not. "
Blow-
" Among the many ways combat all, one of the best is to take photographs, an activity that should be taught early to children as it requires discipline, aesthetic education, good eye and fingers safe. "
With these lines, halfway through his story" Blow- "- Julio Cortazar introduces the mechanism of the photo that will be used to decipher a real life scene. It uses the frame, the development and amplification, and from the scene captured by the camera, the narrator character Robert Michel (translator and photographer) will develop a history of sexual perversity in a park in Paris that maybe it is in the picture but maybe not: it can be all a figment of the photographer and a triumph of subjectivity and their idealism as if at the end of the recorded image was nothing more than an illusion, a fiction.
The unemployed photographer thinks he sees a triangulation: the woman on the bench talking to the boy is not really seduced her but for the man in the gray hat behind the wheel of a car. "The man gray hat was there, watching us. Only then I realized that played a role in the comedy. "
From that history produced Michelangelo Antonioni Blow up the script for his 1967 film, and gives, in a gesture of intellectual honesty that perhaps not being mandatory credit Argentinean writer. The added emphasis or Antonioni is at the end, to underline the illusory nature of photography in motion when a group of mimes playing tennis with an invisible ball and that allows Joan Fontcuberta infer that "the familiar forms of concealed world another reality, is reduced to the certainty that everything-including photography, is pure illusion. "
The negative was so good that the photographer translator prepared an extension, then another and another, as big as a poster. Took a picture of the extension and set the new copy on the wall in front of his typewriter, and occasionally stayed at her. There was no gun in the foliage, as in the Antonioni film, but a situation, meaning that in English we say Have a situation here.
"He spent some time looking and remembering, in the comparative operating and melancholic memory loss against reality, I remember petrified, like any other photo, where nothing was lacking, even and especially anything real fixer the scene. "
The composition of place that sets the camera, the frame is not consciously chosen, the chronicle of a decisive moment, equivalent to approach a story and a drama.
"Michel knew that the photographer always operates as a permutation of his personal way of seeing the world with one that imposes insidious camera," says Cortazar's narrator character. And you understand that ambiguity so characteristic of narrative literature and photography. One reads
Joan Fontcuberta and learns that for him the photograph belongs to the realm of fiction much more than that of the evidence. Fictio fingere is the participle which means invent. The picture is pure invention. All fotograía. No exceptions. "But then you hear" literary fiction "and it sounds great. Listen fiction film and no problem in understanding the idea. But listen to "fiction picture" and do not fit the concept. Might not be fiction. Because
"The eye you see is not
eye because you see it.
eye because it sees you. "
* * * Two of my books, sad Postscript test and a short novel, All the seals, the photo has a descriptive function, narrative, and as thought, as monologue interior. Participate in the text with the intention of characterizing a self narrator character, a teenager grieving between the onset of desire and fear of contact with real women and concrete. Opt for the imaginary relationship and the camera serves as an intermediary, as an attempt to own indirectly.
* * *
Vago
yoked to my camera. I feel like a relationship tool. I do not think I can still see anyone, any woman, with a single, helpless, poor use of my eyes. I gain nothing my naked eyes, I see without seeing, see not accept the life of objects, the incessant pounding of the people, without giving value to life than going down the street, outside my own, which I could not participate.
The shorts girl she was taken into account, was given a place in the world. The portrayed as part of the whole, without realizing that even she, individually, vibrated in the middle of the composition of pond, children, hiking, statue ... was isolated, was slowly moving away from that part of the garden and of that group of women to catch up and walk again with me and watch me sideways.
I know looked at me and see me next to her profile. The telephoto lens replacement, cylindrical and elongated, added to the camera, went straight out in front. As the girl changed course and came into focus when separated from me, I fired. Shot several times. Several times. I returned to shoot up running out of film and breathless, until the mechanism that turns the film tape is stuck.
had no other way of looking at it through the telephoto lens. Looking for a partner and calculated decision: awaited the moment of perfect and walking frame and check that the couple gave me back, he reacted instinctively and made the shot. Only this time often coincided with the music of a radio and enough to propel this unwelcome intrusion to react immediately and release the shutter as if he could photograph the sound. Capture him. Stop. Paralyze and freeze-frame craved.
The lab darkroom smell of lemon and there I was keeping used cartridges of film. For months I just store them. Just went to photograph as every morning in front of the lectern and reload the camera. Out into the street, listening to the imaginary angle formed from above the bridge where the train was going all night. Below, the houses were not enough hot water to hide their red roofs among pirules. Sunday was like a playground of a school. Frames around him silent and sad.
* * *
The bungalows of the casino, the wooden seats, the tennis courts, were without people. Again, the nearby beach or in the vicinity of sulfur baths peeked shows some life. Only one, small and light, bouncing a ball on the basketball court, following the fence. Black and white, the solo player moved in front of me without departing never to the sides and, despite the red and white sweatshirt Club Pegasos, his image was a stain in shades of gray. The player rehearsed several shots, running jumping, throwing the ball against the clay court, stood on your toes and in the split second remaining in the air, in that precise moment, unpremeditated, the result of a well studied movement, launched the ball to the basket, grew by a few seconds and threw all his small, stiff, fibrous body to the basket. The board was trembling, staggering a little and creaking. I got to shoot the camera shamelessly. No. I lay on a bench and soon I was within four fences, and inside a cage in the distant echoing the bouncing of the ball.
whole time I was sitting never dawned on me that the player (which should take between twelve and fifteen, white tennis shoes and red underwear on the Pegasos) was wearing a cap as a golfer, one of those Irish wool caps, stitched segments, which was done in the movies of Chaplin and that, however, was not one of those things but a well-defined cap jockey. For a moment, and without going apparently the case, I started thinking about the photos he had taken from Beverly (when she gets dressed in the hotel room and I said wait, sit in that chair and let me portray) and over the years lost their color in a file of letters and objects absurd useless. I sat watching the lone player was bouncing the ball relentlessly. I crossed the front leg and there, fifty feet or so from the score of the camera, continuing to play the tiny, thin figure of the jockey who gradually came to be delineated through the camera viewfinder to be distinguished clearly. The more or less distant silhouette was cut in outline and gradually focusing on the frame was that I chose: the player or golfer, or rider, or a dwarf, was definitely ready to be caught, to be recorded on film without anyone could help it. The ball crossed the air. The player, displaying a sweatshirt embroidered with the letters Pegasus, jumped to retrieve it. The shot was perfect. Jumping Eagle, impeccable. The shot from behind the neck, without touching the rim. Rebound. Since the white line from the far corner of the court. The continued rebound between the legs. The ball spinning in the fingertip. The jockey ran inside chamber, went, went, came back, took a long jump and triple jump athletes and put, placed, deposited the ball into the basket. Free throws. Half-court shots. The camera stopped working. I went back to wear it on his chest. I returned the plug to the full as he puts a gun safe and kept the camera in leather case
* * *
When I do not meet even 50 years, randomly placed in my personal pantheon picture that gives me my cousin Dora and I never saw the files on my home: my father it appears before the age of 25 years, by 1941, one of the bars of Tijuana, clothing cowboy. Tom Mix your face I viewed from the right side of the picture and I look out of his eyes in 1941 and I think, then, still not born, yet not I, but in some strange way I've started to be and be in the world. Neither he nor I
to be young again.
Madrid, June 4, 2009
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