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I like photography because it is open to silence. A waiting place, unnamed and inviting. In the last meetings I don’t hear much, like it’s never really my turn to talk. I miss the warmth of a colder and simpler stare. When we both know, (we all know). When we don’t repeat. Why use mouths to make so much noise? I wish I could leave but can’t think of another place. So, I’m waiting.
Untitled photograph by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved
“There is nowhere but here. There are not two places, there are not two prisons. It’s my parlour, where I wait for nothing. I don’t know where it is, I don’t know what it’s like. that’s no business of mine. I don’t know if it’s big, or if it’s small, or if it’s closed, if it’s open… Open on what? There is nothing else, only it. Open on the void , open on the nothing… Open on the silence, looking out on the silence, straight out - why not?”
Untitled photograph by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved
“All this time on the brink of silence, I knew it! On a rock, lashed to a rock, in the midst of silence. Its great swell rears towards me, I’m streaming with it. (It’s an image: those are words.) It’s a body, It’s not I - I knew it wouldn’t be. I’m not outside, I’m inside, I’m in something. I’m shut up: the silense is outside. Nothing but this voice and the silence all round. No need of walls? Yes we must have walls: I need walls, good and thick. I need a prison (I was right), for me alone. I’ll go there now, I’ll put me in it.”
From Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable (1953)
Photograph by Camilla Hill, Portobello, London © 2007 All rights reserved
One of my favourite passages in film history, yet not a very well known.
Charles’s dialogue with his psychiatrist from Robert Bresson’s Le Diable Probablement (The Devil, Probably, 1977) reads like a poem of disillusionment.
In Charles’s life education, physical love, religion, psychanalysis, one by one, are rejected. Politics too.
“Governments are short sighted…” announces a bus passenger. Another says not to blame governments, “it’s the masses who determine events”. Someone then asks, “So, who is it that makes a mockery of humanity? Who’s leading us by the nose?” And the first man replies with subtle irony “The Devil, probably…”
Few years ago, a series of my photos (see an example below) were inspired by this film.
Photo by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved (Click on image for full view)
The University of Leeds expands through the north of the city. But, what do we see? A major educational institution is perhaps the answer… but what else?… Can we see the layers of reality unfolding over, the same way as an amalgam of different buildings from separate epochs compete for space?
Do we see a leading force in teaching and research? Yes, but what are its aims? Knowledge of what and for what? Is it there for supplying skilled labour to local and international businesses? Is it imagined as a kind of garden for individuals to flourish, or a well thought and managed sausage-factory?
Consider coldly, and rather impartially, who takes the decisions and who influences its strategies and plans? What is its role in the society; is it part of a process serving social needs -and who defines those of course, or elitist aspirations and stakeholders’ interests? Is it part of a wider movement toward the democratisation of education and well-being, or reproduces the existing structures of social power and control? Maybe we should start from the simple question, who has access to this institution, and who hasn’t…
Photo by Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved (Click on image for full view)
In 1896, the first female student began a course here, who, according to Wikipedia, studied Modern Literature and Education - itself quite a feminised subject as we may comment now. So, have things changed? Considering of course that we want social change and inclusion, rather than just rhetoric. Is social class, and gender and ethnicity and dis-ability and all the other social barriers finally entities of the past, or are they still reproduced? What about young people with a history of mental health difficulties or with a criminal record, do have they access?… What about the millions of international students whose parents can not afford the £25,000 approximate fee (without counting other costs) for a three years degree?…
Maybe it is not a question of ‘either/or‘, maybe it’s a question of ‘both/and‘. And it remains for the viewer to make sense of some form of reality through the pragmatic and modernised new rhetoric. So, can we see through?
“When the child was a child,
it didn’t know that it was a child,
everything was soulful,
and all souls were one.”
Peter Handke’s Song of Childhood, from Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin), came to my mind when writing an earlier post here -few days ago- about the Eternal Children.
“When the child was a child,
it had no opinion about anything,
had no habits,
it often sat cross-legged,
took off running,
had a cowlick in its hair,
and made no faces when photographed.”
This is a film that still haunts me, since the first unsuspected time, with its magic, its little surprises and original questions - which slowly reveal themselves, the poetic motion and engulfment.
I vividly remember the first time that I discovered the pleasure of photography by simply changing the vantage point of my view. So much, I also remember the experience and awe felt by the monochromatic cinematography, when first viewed the Wings of Desire.
Parallel to what is portrayed on the film, the longing for physicality and the emphasis on human relations, there has been since then a personal desire to retouch the mystical, non-straightforward, but critically real world that I once saw.
Henri Alekan, at the age of 77, was the director of photography. Interestingly, I found out now, that he used a unique, very old and fragile silk stocking that belonged to his grandmother as a filter for the monochromatic sequences.
There is a wonderful interview of Henri Alekan here, under the title ‘If there such a thing as real angels.’ It is intriguing to read his explanations about many scenes of the film. Even more, his personal views on artistic expression and lens-based image making. I picked up, for example, two points. One where he says, ‘I just don’t believe that electronic effects can make the public experience the same communication you can achieve with a trick that is manually executed.” And another one where he emphasises his approach by pointing out that “a certain level of illumination for the image to be recorded on film [is necessary] but it must correspond intimately with what will happen, with the action.”
All the photographs in this article are film-frames from Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire.
Christos Stavrou © 2007 All rights reserved
What will be happening next? We need change and excitement.
The final lines from ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ a poem by greek poet Cavafy came to my mind:
“Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.“
[By Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933), translated by Edmund Keeley]
Leeds, Olympus OM-4, Zuiko 100/2.8 © 2006 Christos Stavrou
What are the clouds? An architecture of chance?
[...]
Maybe the cloud is emptiness returning,
just like the man who watches it this morning.
Jorge Luis Borges, 1996
London, Olympus OM-4, Zuiko 55/1.2 © 2006 Christos Stavrou
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