MAX PAM (Australia, 1949),
SCIANNA (Italy, 1949)
The cosmological voyage
It is judicious to conclude this history of black and white
photographers with travel photographs. The latter are as constant to
photography as family pictures, which we have just considered with Boltanski.
Here again, we had to wait until the seventies for this very ancient theme to
give matter to photographic subjects, perhaps because, at the time, travelling
drew all its strength in becoming cosmologic.
1. Cosmologic space travel: Max Pam
As soon as 1850, the first photographers left for Greece, Palestine,
Egypt, or simply for Central Europe, to bring back detailed and evident archaeological
photographs. This was not really travelling. In 1893, Peter Henry Emerson’s On
English Lagoons and 1907’s The North American Indian by Curtis show an attitude that is more anthropological than it is travelling. Assuredly, in the thirties, the
reportages by Walker Evans, Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa do include a notion
of travel, but one that is very fleeting.
It is only in the 1970’s that Westerners started photographing other
countries regularly and in large numbers, with an aim to participate to the
lives of these countries, making this participation an ultimate goal. This sort
of spiritual exercise consisted in entering, for a few weeks or a few months,
in a value system that was radically opposite to theirs, in a cultural
conversion that was voluntarily partial and temporary.
Why so late, and why Westerners? Perhaps because, to reach that point,
three cultural mutations had to comfort each other. (A) That we reached the
point of perceiving everyone and ourselves as states-moments of a universe in
an irreversible, imprevisible and de-centrating evolution. (B) That – in particular
– the revolution of species was understood – in this universe
– as provoking new specific apparitions that were also irreversible. (C)
That, after having believed in the universal man for around a century – with
a peak during the Bauhaus – each felt the relativity of his own culture
in a concrete manner, one that was not solely theoretical. Then, the true
participative and mutative voyage became simultaneously attractive and
redoubtable, sacred in the sense of Rudolf Otto. For nothing is more dangerous
than truly participating to two civilizations at once. Like Victor Segalen,
between China and France, had felt it as a poet as soon as 1920.
Photography is ambiguous for the peak experience (in the sense of
Maslow) that the initiatory voyage represents. Because it offers the comfort of
getting close to disorientation while neutralizing it: whilst one is busy
setting a camera to ‘take’ an incineration in Nasik, one is distracted from the
event. The too-disturbing present changes into a future (‘this will be developed
and seen one day), that will offer a composed past (‘in Nasik, we saw an
incineration’). At the same time, taking photographs may – if the
operation follows a certain asceticism – provide the opportunity to
receive full blast the aggression of the present, to hold it close, to
radicalize it by not seeing it as unsettling or curious facts, but as a truly
different space-time, that of another culture, hence of another world, behind
facts. In a word, by grasping under the solely pictorial themes the matter of a
true photographic subject, meaning a converting topology, cybernetic,
logico-semiotic.
Max Pam intensely represents these participative, mutative, vertiginous
travellers that made travel photography into an initiatory journey firstly for
the photographer, and secondly for others. He is Australian, which means that
he swims in Australia’s situation of behaviourist modernity. At the extreme
spiritual opposite, he is confronted to Asia, and in Asia to India, which is
perhaps even more disconcerting that Segalen’s China. He also travelled
elsewhere. But to optimally grasp his practice of the great cultural split, we
must follow him in India, and even in this distant region of the Ladakh, which
was polyandrous at the time, and is still one of the highest regions of the
world.
In the photograph we are discussing (*CI, 4), this military tent, the
foot of the soldier sticking out, the mountain so high that, at the peak on
which we are, we no longer see it, already make up quite a strong theme. However,
it is in the photographic subject that the essence occurs. The frame is square.
In this immobile square, the events circle according to the Indian circularity
of the karma. The photo becomes a Tibetan mandala, a circle within a square,
even a moving circle in the unmoving square. However, this would only be a
symbol applied to the theme. To obtain the fulgurating mixture that this
photograph represents, the circulation of the internal circle could not be
closed as in a traditional mandala, but had to be irreversibly opened by the immeasurable
distance between the very particular (the tent and the feet of the lying man)
and the strictly immense (the mountain shying away) in a mandala, which is now
active and exploded. The western world made Asian through the mandala. Asia
becoming western by the opening of the mandala. Beyond every picturesque à la
Salgado, and beyond every trivial psychology and sociology.
The Deux Sœurs de la Montagne (**CI, I) are more naively cosmological. The
photo has kept only the extreme poles that are, on the one part, the two bodies
at the centre of the forefront, and on the other part, the stone of the
original mountain in its generative mist, in the background and the centre.
Between the ancestral mountain and the actual children, the bed of the valley
of stones runs frontally towards them and us, between two other mountains, two
banks, the alluvial bed of the geological and cosmological process itself. The
heads of the two sisters could have rejoined the original mountain,
overstepping it. The photographer left, between them and the mother mountain,
enough space for the filiation process to show us its millions of years.
Once again, the mandala of the framing turns clockwise through three
mountains for two heads, two heads for one mountain, two springing up of heads
for two depressions of the mountains. Once again, a movement triggers the
explosion of the mandalian movement, which is lateral: the frontal movement of
the process, opening a cosmos to a universe.
2. Cosmologic voyage in time: Scianna
Scianna is born the same year as Max Pam. He also travels intensely,
making photography an initiatory voyage to otherness. However, he travels in
time, and the company is as dangerous, multicultural than space travel, since
the epochs are as foreign and strange between them than places.
For this, there had to be a closed-in space, where moments of culture
jostle each other until the unceasing time, like Sicily with its situation of
central canal lock of the Mediterranean, its Empedoclean Etna, its cultural
stratums crossed and coloured as the pieces of the legendary Pietraperzia
apron.
For this vertigo to become photographical, it was an advantage of being
a native of the island, but it was also good to have left it before returning
regularly (as Nicolas Nixon would come back, in the same era, before the Brown
Sisters) with an
untiring amazement, encouraged by the photonic imprints that grasps what we
seek and what we expect, but also what we do not see and do not expect.
Particularly if, as shown in 1977’s The Sicilinas (LS, 38), this supposed a certain
way of capturing the in-depth stratifications of space (LS, 80, 82, 87) capable
of making the in-depth stratifications of time being felt (LS, 38). A serial
vision towards the background exemplified by the stairs on the cover, and also
in the manner that an innocent putto is folded in the unfolded slides of its
volutes (***LS, 23).
How can we resume, in one image, a photographic subject where everything
is recurrence and comparison? The portrait of Leonardo Sciascia, dated 1967, could perhaps do (****ArtPress, special issue photo, 1990). The theme confronted two
generations, the writer Sciascia and his children. The encounter had to occur
in the church of Sciascia’s native village, Recalmuto. Moreover, it had to take
place before a dead Christ to declare simultaneously the committed Christian
writer and the Italian depth of time. Probably the mature Sciascia suggested a
good part of the composition to the young, 18-year old photographer.
Yet, it is the eye of the latter that – at the end of the day
– saw the triad of time so firmly (the past of the dead Christ, the
future of the two children, the present of Sciascia) catch up in time through
these triads of space: the past of the background, the future of the forefront,
the present between the two. The past lies down, the future looks, the present
walks; the past is transversal, the future faces, and the present is oblique,
exploiting the spatial-temporal layering of the Italian Baroque that our putto
warned us about. And by seeing how the horizontal whites of the cloth of the
altar and the display cabinet of the Christ could be crossed by the white
vertical of the little girl without loosing the stratum of the ages through the
four heads.
During those 70’s, the initiatory and perilous voyage in the layers of
time was not Scianna’s isolated invention. Around him, Italian designers were
learning that, along with the universal technical demands inherited from the
Bauhaus and updated by the ULM school, it was urgent to re-activate –
through the contemporary utensil – some layers of the past, in what they
would call the re-semantisation. It was not yet the post-modernism or the Transavantguardia italiana, but Italy, through its synchronic practice of two thousand years diachronic,
has always felt – or anticipated – this sort of game with history.
* and ** © Max Pam / Métis.
*** and **** © Fernande Scianna / Magnum.
Henri Van Lier
A photographic history of photography
in Les Cahiers de la Photographie, 1992
List of abbreviations of common references:
CI: Caméra International, Paris.
The acronyms (*), (**), (***) refer to
the first, second, and third illustration of the chapters, respectively. Thus,
the reference (*** AP, 417) must be interpreted as: “This refers to the third
illustration of the chapter, and you will find a better reproduction, or a
different one, with the necessary technical specifications, in The Art of
Photography listed under
number 417”.