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French Institute Budapest, September 13-October 11, 2001.
Collegium Hungaricum, Vienna, October 17-November 7, 2001.
When a photographer consciously gives up employing the sight of something found, s/he does not necessarily choose the freedom of expression. A photogram is a photograph made from the imprints of objects and shapes and, perhaps most importantly, of sheer light. It is photography distilled: it can be produced by the application of the same technique as that which involves transposing visible elements of reality onto photosensitive paper. Yet there is a conspicuous difference with a photogram: the lack of a distance between the object chosen and the photographic paper. The image is brought about by the proximity and openness of the two rather than by their distance.
Despite all that a photogram does not hinge on an objective image; there is no sight to be represented behind the product. There are only shapes of light, blurred drawings of the inner pictures of the imagination. The object laid out across the photosensitive paper, the form directly imposed on it, coalesce with the power of light to yield an object-transcendent symbolic, poetic meaning: the absence, the dark patch which the object cuts out of the light-covered world. We have a genuine psychological paradigm: Jung called this picture developed on the film of the soul the shadow of the personality.
And yet it would be inappropriate to regard this disappearance of the elements of reality from the picture, their transformation of the lucent elements of the poetic imagination into painting-like surrealistic compositions as a result of the photographer’s creative freedom: the freedom of forms requires a creative attitude which is imbued with genuine responsibility. They get the photographer to interpret the visible result of her free association within the frame of her stream of thoughts. Could the attempt to force the non-existent into expression, into an image, involve greater constraint than the effort to render the existing in a representation? Could the issue of responsibility be identical with that of recognition? According to a Zen parable ignorance is the gravest sin of man. Reversing the question we can ask: could knowledge be a curse?
Aliona Frankl tries to photograph details which are related to time in a contingent manner. Her themes include small shops before going out of business, cafés on the verge of disappearance, neon signs of espresso bars waiting to be demolished, human figures from a bygone age lingering in a world which is alien to them. She places the themes of her pictures at two temporal levels: while being hastened by the violent contrary trends of a fast-changing world, they are made to stand still at least for the bried moment of photographic expsosure. In Aliona’s photographs transient atmosphere, objects and figures, city scenes and coffee grounds going cool at the bottom of a glass, freeze into eternity. By contrast, her photograms manage to capture a perfectly subjective sense of something hovering, independent of all spaces and time, devoid of colour and direction. The pictures now on show reveal broken human figures swaying hither and thither, with sharpk cuts in their bodies signalling divides between the areas of the existing and those of insubstantial thought, which somehow complements the former. Figures sawed into parts, flickering light-men and light-women ripped asunder in the area of their heart. Dancing, swimming, bowing and kneeing, they stage scenes with the movements of their bodies (relationship? self-exposure? or, on the contrary, splitting up, breaking off, getting away?). They exist and move in a mediumless enviroment, withou a background or foreground, lonely, abandoned forever. Aliona’s photograms are populated by beings with one-minute lives. Their gestures are the very meaning of their lives, they are born and perish in one particular situation. Their existence is inseparable from one particular situation. Not unlike the way light and photosensitive paper are related to each other, these beings reveal from in a flash: essence becomes instantly and finally visible, there is no opportunity for modification. The manner of their creation leaves its brand on their being, the light-filled moment illuminates the cause and the goal, the road and the arrival. There is something however, that makes this single-meaning world order uncertain. As opposed to lthe photographs, products of a similar technique, the photograms shown at the Gentle Line exhibition display genuinely gentle contours. Aliona achieves this effect by placing a glass object filled with water between the figures which leave behind a shape of light and the sensitised paper, sometimes making the surface wavy, sometimes just letting the water melt away the sharpness of contours, the hard edges of forms, like in a fire. She wanted to find out how the image created by matter-of-fact reality would turn out when sifted through the water element of instinct. Would it dissolve the events, actors and situations in the story, or would it drift them into some current of a shared direction, patch up the sense of something missing in relationships, enlarged into rips, weave into a continuous story the scenes embodied in the individual images, often the accidental outcome of contingent forces?
The exhibition shown in the French Institue and the Collegium Hungaricum in Vienna projects questions and answers onto each other. The underwater pictures have resulted in gently lined photograms, and the sharp questions received mysterious answers with blurred outlines. But the genuine connection is not to be sought between the question and the answer, the object and the image. It is rather to be sought in the questioner – in this case the artist – and the technique. In a shrewd and sensitive manner, these photograms resolve the basic problematic of photography, the paradoxical relationship between its subjective and objective nature. What is inside now comes outside, and what exists outside the sublect evokes the innermost circle in this underwater world of images. The reality of the picture is questioned just as much as the idea that the soul cannot, after all, be something objective. If, in our thoughts, we place Alina’s photograms closely side by side, the gentle line of continuous interplay, overlaps, waves and ambiguities unite in an ultrasound curve of the heart.
Szerző: Eszter Götz
Fordító: Translated by Dezső Bánki
Nyelv: english
Megjelenés helye: Fotóművészet
Megjelenés dátuma: 2001
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