TO FEEL A PHOTO


Green sensation - Comacchio (2019)


In the famous picture called "The Steerage" by Alfred Stieglitz, the one taken in 1907 on the cruise ship SS Kaiser Wilhelm II, we find, reading the words of the same author, a situation of "moment received", so different from the Bressonian rhetoric of the "decisive moment". Stieglitz has this vision while he stands on the deck of the ship that is taking him back to Europe, so he runs to take the camera that is in his cabin, fearing that in the meantime the key elements of that image (the man with the straw hat and the woman with the child) can move and ruin the balance of the scene. Instead, on his return, everything is exactly as he left it, as if the photograph had waited for him. In this story, I see a lot of mindful-photography.

There is another episode in Stieglitz's life which, in my opinion, hides a spiritual component, namely his commitment to the Clouds series (The Equivalents). According to him, in the gesture of impressing the clouds, he is trying to reproduce music with images. He would like the great musicians of his time to see their art represented by looking at his photos of cirrostratus and cumulonimbus. The goal is to bridge the differences between the sensations of the body (The Equivalents) and thus be able to "see" the music, "hear" an image, or "touch" a word. Everything is experience, everything converges and coincides in the source and goal of each sensory event, which is the very reason for existence.

But going further into the biography of the great American master, I think that his was not just a study of the photographic language, but a sort of inner research, a philosophical and spiritual journey of which perhaps he was not even totally aware. It is well known that Stieglitz's life has been very tormented. Nonetheless, the photographs in the Clouds series recall the traces of a "mystical-creative path" in which spirituality and creativity go hand in hand.

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