MAKING THE INVISIBLE, VISIBLE
with thanks to Alfred Stieglitz and John Berger
SELF-EXPRESSION
In my youthful studying to become a photographer there was satisfaction in successfully copying reality. This satisfaction was founded in producing a technically successful, compositionally interesting image, which I thought of as faithfully representing the world of people and things. As I matured, I began to recognize that it was in fact a superficial, banal and insufficient creative gesture. It was more like news photography where the event (scoring a goal, making a speech, blowing up a building) is all important and the formal and even technical dimensions were less important.
EQUIVALENTS
This recognition opened me intellectually. I began to accept my need for self-expression would gain relevance to the real world as well as to a potential audience if I could find a path to what the famous American photographer Alfred Stieglitz called Equivalents. He wrote:
“More than describing the visible surfaces of things, the works could express pure emotion, paralleling the artist’s own inner state.”
In particular I began to understand that I too might be able to visually articulate meaningful human moments and not only the existence of things (a horse, a landscape, a rock) but also their essence. These became representations of my deeper thoughts and feelings, but also more truthful and faithful images of people’s individual and collective struggle to survive and to grasp meanings in the cycles of life and death.
UNIVERSALITY
This appreciation of the idea of Equivalents also led me to an understanding that as much as I appreciate literature and in particular poetry, we live within conditions that are often un-wordable, unspeakable mysteries of life where literary culture fails but visual culture can offer some salvation.
When a photograph is formally and contextually successful (in my terms) it may transcend the mundane reality of day-by-day life; it may become more universal. The simple revelation of other’s inner reality somehow could become imminent in my images, partly because I was looking for it, knowing it exists in all of us. This was perhaps what the English novelist and painter, John Berger, referred to as ‘making the invisible, visible’.
RECOGNISING THE ‘OTHER’
I began to see that a part of my task to communicate, to offer a viewer recognition that their own being is not unlike the ‘other’s being. In this, nationalism, sexism, racism and other prejudices are challenged, and in moments of wonder, may be overcome, to renew the viewer’s humanity. This is how I have wished my photographs and films to help make a better more humane, and kinder world.
I now see that my task has been for many years to reduce the emotional and intellectual distance between the everyday and the universal mysteries of life. I do not say that I succeed well, but the effort has made life more meaningful.