A dip in the wonderful history of photography, visually exciting and unexpected views. This is the book by Geoff Dyer , The infinite moment , published by Einaudi.
not intended to treat the subject in its historical or artistic Accessory parts or in respect of any aesthetic considerations of photography, but uses a similar approach to literature and in this way, like watching a lot of images and bits of memory spread across a large table, the author must be obtained with these endless stories that jumping from one image to ' another, from one period to another, end to reveal the underlying theme of one big story that took shape from page to page.
materializes, so, to our astonished eyes, the precise story of human history.
Dyer talks about photography as a narrative. Of others and ourselves through others. Card after card, build a clever mosaic of life, guiding the reader in all phases of this construction bold. It is extremely tempting to be guided in this process constructively and identification because in the end, it is the picture that emerged as a protagonist, it is proposed to the reader in its noble value of a real builder of a historical identity, like the music , reading or painting. It follows in its entirety the legality of photography to take responsibility for history.
The author moves between the images with disillusionment with the apparent inadequacy, finding connections in time and space as an imaginary thread, sew fragments of images in a speech that unravels intriguing in the pages of the book captures the reader, in a sequence of tracks, trails infinite by definition.
A man in dark coat, hat, hands in pocket, walking slowly (often, though not always, away from the camera). The dark coat and hat often mean that man is only a silhouette. Always returns in the images of Kertész. This is not to say that it only appears in his: man is also present in the work of many other photographers (although everything is there to see), but in that of Kertész lingers, and by that I mean actually say the opposite: the camera lingers Kertész and focuses on him. It's the classic immigrant, sometimes seems to have been cut and pasted from a photo on the Hungarian city of New York with its huge modern architecture of bridges and warehouses.
As frequently happens for those reasons that are associated with maturity and in particular the last years of Kertész, these figures had appeared for the first time in his early works. We meet them ... let me rephrase the sentence: we meet this character - because it was indeed a real character, instantly recognizable from his overcoat and hat, two elements that cancel any other characteristic - in 1914 in Budapest, and at night walking alone on the pavement. Camus said that when we see the birds at night we always tend to think that they are returning to their nest, but in looking man in overcoat Kertész you never have that feeling. There is never a lighted window to give him a nod of invitation. No, they are the same streets, the fact of walking - the coat to tell the truth - that took the same security offered by a house. Even then the man seems a shadow of its former self, it seems unable to move quickly and it is unthinkable to imagine that ever was able to run, and think that Kertész began photographing the man in the same period in which he made those shots and powerful self- his brother, undressed, almost naked, while running, love of movement. Although there something Kertész want nostalgically the future, a time when those summer days with his brother would be a memory, fading in the minds of men who walk, even in the snow as if wearing slippers, walking the streets like walk along the hospital ward of a cold, suffering from a disorder without a name whose only cure is to continue to walk "An echo of days reached me," writes Cavafy:
Youth Burning, a start ...
clung to my hands
The letter found;
till the light languishes, the more times
retraced.
To take your mind
I looked out the balcony, because the flow
beloved city for a little 'me lambisse,
And the tremble of the trade, the way ...
What Kertész sees when he looks out the window on the street is that this pattern often represents his feelings, being in New York, uprooted and misunderstood. The people on the street, directly in the negotiations, are emissaries of his sadness. This is the fate of the photographer to walk the streets or sitting on a bench, looking out the window or people walking or sitting on the benches.
[ Geoff Dyer, The infinite moment , photo essay on ]
Readings
Geoff Dyer, The infinite moment , photo essay on , Einaudi 2007
Images
1-cover of The Infinite Instant , essay on photography
2 - Andre Kertesz , Bocskay-ter, Budapest 1914
3 - Andre Kertesz, New York 1954
Music
Duke Ellington & John Coltrane , Impulse 1962.
