MICHELANGELO’S SLAVES
I want to share with you
thoughts about Michelangelo’s eight Slave sculptures,
sometimes called the Prisoners,
which can be seen in Academia in Florence.
The struggle of the slave to tear himself out of the stone
led me to understand my need to liberate myself
from my surrounding social/political and economic constraints
which I came to see controlled my thinking
and the boundaries of my imagination.
These constraints were always apparent
in any exchange with bureaucrats, teachers, parents
and my peer’s social attitudes.
These constraints of laws, rules, habits and manners
seeped deep into the surrounding social norms,
the popular culture and indeed
into my school rooms and family’s life.
In the simplest way, I began to understand
those who entrapped me in their ‘normal world’
were shadows in front of my lenses,
obscuring the truths of the world.
The slave’s struggle personalised for me
my efforts to obey my own inclinations
to become what and whom I wished to be,
even in the face of family and personal hostility.
The SLAVES taught me that I wanted to become a ‘mensch’ –
a word that in German means ‘to be a man’,
but in Yiddish* it means ‘to be filled with humanity’.
Perhaps through the heroes of my young life –
Martin Luther King, Mohammed Ali, to Gandhi and later Mandela,
through the photographers and poets and novelists I viewed and read
and the things I had done –
to wish to become a mensch seemed necessary.
The concept linked for me my desire to understand the world and people
with my need to define who I was
and what I wished to be,
while explaining to myself my opposition to what I saw
as a macho, supposedly manly but vulgar and ignoble world of men.
The SLAVES posed other questions to me.
How could I, an average person,
produce work that could speak to other human beings?
How could I commit my skills to create a better world?
Indeed, how could light passing through my lenses
affect other’s consciousness,
as had the many pictures that affected my view of life?
Remembering the rough-hewn stone
against the SLAVE’S partly exposed finely polished flesh
showed me I needed to develop skills and craftsmanship;
and that I needed to learn the history of my medium
so as not to attempt to reinvent the wheel.
Meanwhile I had been introduced to the novels of Andre Malraux
(MAN’S FATE about freewill),
to Jean Paul Sartre (NAUSEA) about the nature of existence
in a rotten world
and to his BEING AND NOTHINGNESS
about the nature of human life and the limits of freedom).
I was introduced to and especially found relevant
the works of Albert Camus (THE STRANGER and THE PLAGUE)
about the absurdity and tragedy of human life,
and to THE MYTH of SISYPHUS
in which Camus finds
in recognizing the potential dignity of life
through people’s unstoppable struggle for freedom,
one can overcome life’s inherently absurd and tragic nature.
To me, a diligent, intellectually hungry but humourless young person,
a part of Camus’ brilliance was to write
“that while our psyche wishes to survive, our bodies are destined to die”.
All of these worked on my young and slowly maturing mind.
As I struggled to overcome my dark view of life –
its venality, small-mindedness, its ugliness, people’s disregard of beauty,
poetry and lofty ideals,
I needed to assemble a way to embrace my passion for living
and my lust for life –
for making images,
for making a meaningful life
and for making love.
Recalling the struggle of the SLAVES, perhaps most importantly
I had to come to understand
the differences between art that serves those who rule history
and art that serves the victims of that history.
I instinctively understood
that I must come to discover the differences between serving wealth
and serving truth.
In so doing, I discovered the difference between art and commercial art,
between art and propaganda;
between helping oppressed or helping liberate other’s imaginations.
I came to understand the differences
between creating work that addresses people’s needs
from works of decoration and entertainment
that either ignore those needs
or reinforce the ideas of the status quo.
I‘m not saying I had come to complete resolutions about all of these things,
nor indeed that I could even articulate them as I can now,
but rather, these were the ideas I continually tussled with.
For reasons I will not belabour you,
across many years I shot pictures like this to make a living:
Eventually I was able to turn my back on commercialism.
Here is a more recent photographs.
Does the later ones seem quieter,
less obvious,
perhaps in relation to the graphics of the first pictures
it seems visually dull?less obvious,
perhaps in relation to the graphics of the first pictures
it seems visually dull?
The still-lives are meant to seduce you into buying something;
the documentary images are meant to encourage you to ask questions.
The still-lives come from the offerings of street vendors;
the documentary images come from what? An artist? A journalist? A truth-teller?
The still-lives want your money;
the documentary images want your emotional and intellectual engagement.
At some point in my young life
I discovered in Ernest Hemingway’s novel, THE OLD MAN and THE SEA
that a particular struggle,
for instance a group of people’s hatred of another group,
or in the case of his novel,
a struggle with a fish turned into a trial of human endurance
and of human goodness.
I was beginning to catch a glimpse of metaphor.
The sculptor Giacometti wrote,
“looking is an interrogation of the absolute”.
That says ‘artists must always be curious‘,
with a curiosity which at the worst of times,
is condemned by the authorities as detrimental to public order.
I began to understand why the hierarchies who dominate my life
have only contempt for artists, and a bit of fear,
unless those artists can decorate their master’s palaces,
entertain them,
or effectively communicate
their ideologically soaked messages to the rest of society.
It led me to understand that propaganda
is a one-sided proclamation
that demands unquestioning acceptance of the message,
whereas art encourages enquiry and a dialogue.
If before the “making” there is contemplation and discovery,
artists may transform trivia by their gaze and skill
into a contemplation of history - of power, wealth or poverty,
of gods or holy spirits,
of certainty or confusion,
or of being and nothingness.
All of this I learned from Michelangelo’s SLAVES.
NOTES
* Literally “man,” an honourable, decent, stand-up person or as defined above
This essay is extracted from a series of visual talks
I am currently working on called
THINKING ABOUT PHOTOGRAPHY
which will eventually be available here on Substack.