The Voyeurs, after André Kertész

André Kertész: Circus, c.1925


The Voyeurs

What are they staring at? Haven't they seen enough?
Perhaps it's natural to stare at backs.
Just as we pass a lighted window light makes
visible that wealth of alien stuff
of which half our minds are made,
leaving us lustful, lost and afraid.

They too are in transit. Look at his hat
(a straw boater), her headscarf (a long
inverted flame), the way their clothes hang.
There must be a hole in the wooden slat
and beyond it something perfectly new
and terrifying that light will not let through.

from Blind Field (1994)


The inverted flame (the shape made by her headscarf) is an ancient symbol of death and eternal life I first came across in Botticelli.

Hand colouring

The advent of digital photography has relieved photography of its burden of evidential truth telling. Before digitalisation and Photoshop a manipulated photo was, we felt, a fraud whereby enemies of the state might be wiped from history. The small case we brought out of Hungary also contained some of my mother’s hand coloured photographs. I remember watching my mother working with half a razor blade and tiny tubes of photo oils mixed in a saucer. I couldn’t quite tell – still can’t - where she drew the line between evidential truth and embellishment, between document and lies. And yet I only had to look at her face. She generally wore make-up. Her lipstick was scarlet and she blackened a beauty spot on her face. She was considered rather beautiful partly as a result of these embellishments, so when she relieved a pair of photographed eyes of their bags, or rouged a pair of cheeks into faintly mortuary bloom it was no more than she would have done for herself. She did it for us too, for her two children. We too were given mortuary cheeks.

Some more thoughts about the Hungarian photo essay.

Some Hungarian women photographers

As ever, less is known, less widely about them, but some were quite wonderful. For instance there is Kata Kálmán (1909-1978), who documented working class life in Hungary, like this:



And like this:



I take these photos from here and there. There is a single comment on the page with the boy eating bread. Thanks, I was looking for a high-res picture of that boy, eating bread. By the way the picture was taken in 1931, the boy's name was Varga Laci (family name, given name order), he was 4 years old, and he died in the same year.

Or there is Kata Sugár (1910-1943), about whom I can find little:



And the marvellous Sylvia Plachy (1943-)



and Kati Horna (1912-2000):



Kati Horna was the close friend of Robert Capa in Berlin and Paris, and - so it seems -already established herself, introduced him to the right people for whom he could work. She then photographed the Spanish Civil War. Not the front, not so much the combatants, but its effect on people generally.

I have draft of the essay that needs a good deal of overhauling and I still have the cold, now in stage two, the stuffed up stage.

Heavy cold, taking the waters

Martin Munkácsi taking a shot of a diver for Harper's Bazaar, at Long Island, USA,1935

Woke with sore throat and soon enough the cold arrived, so I have been working and drifting most of the day. The work is the 5000 word essay on Hungarian photography for the coming show at the Royal Academy. It is one of three essays as far as I recall and I don't know what is in the others. What I do know is that I am the Hungarian-born contributor so I imagine I am to provide a Hungarian perspective, which might be to show in what way the Hungarian photographers represent something specifically Hungarian and why this should have proved to be so successful in the period between the wars.

Organising a 5000 word essay on the basis of limited knowledge and a few ideas is quite hard work, but it's almost done.


Underwater Swimmer, André Kertész, 1917

In the meantime the piano tuner calls. I am looking up references. My nose drips. Another idea this time to last me through three paragraphs. If poetry is the best words in the best order, perhaps an essay is the best paragraphs in the best order. I still have another 500 words or so to play with, then I'll see whether I have bored the pants off myself and everyone else. I do think there are some ideas in there. Are they good ones? I will have a clearer idea tomorrow. In the meantime, one more Hungarian swimming pool.



Károly Escher, The Bank Director's Bath, 1920s (I've had him before)


Water as a subject: science, beauty and mirror. Broken form, grace, weight, vulnerability, occupation. I have a head full of water at the moment.

Muntjack

Driving into Norwich, I leave the A11 at Cringleford, moving off the sliproad, up the slope, to cross back over above the A11 into Eaton Street and hence, back under the A11, to Bluebell Road. There is a young muntjack standing right by the road, its hindquarters slightly protruding into road space. I am going very slowly but it doesn't move. It must be petrified. There is no going ahead for it without descending into the fast and dangerous A11. There might be turning back if only there weren't a stream of cars moving, moving slowly, but moving, as I am moving.

The muntjack is so still that I wonder for a moment, as I pass it, whether it is a joke, a stuffed muntjack. Its eyes look glassy. It does not stir a muscle. I steer a little to my left to give it clear space. I wouldn't want to startle it down into the main road. Already I am past it, and I see the car behind me has slowed down for a second or two, before also steering wide of it. But then the muntjack moves, not its feet, only its tail, and only a little, almost indisceribly, but sufficiently to show it is flesh and blood. How long can it stay there, frozen, without the impulse to run one way or the other?

I think briefly of Elizabeth Bishop's wonderful long poem, 'The Moose', the sense of nature being 'out of place' but oddly totemic, as something that joins us, astonishingly, briefly, so that we all feel a little lightning-struck, as still in our minds as the muntjack in body.

There is something in that curious, all but unplacable act of bonding that is hard to describe (I sometimes get it with the cats when our eyes meet, but not quite in this way.) It is as if we had seen a ghost, all of us at once. It is the ghost of the existence we have never led but know to be possible. The muntjack for a moment inhabits us, then, given a good deal of luck, it turns and dives back into the trees to our left and we forget it.

Memory isn't like a photograph really. It is more a shudder.

Coincidence

It is, of course, a coincidence that the mild occasional excesses of the US Tea Party occur in the administration of the first black US President. The man caressing the head of the young female protester with his foot is just a good old fashioned conservative Republican. The poster saying 'Use your vote like a rope: Hang 'em high' (referred to near the end) is nothing to do with the honourable old habit of lynching. The political orientation of Barack Obama is sadly somewhere between Stalin, Chavez and Hitler. But then that's what having a National Health system does for you: it turns you into Stalin or, trim the moustache, Hitler. And that is why gun sales are soaring. It's really nothing to do with Obama being black. That is just a coincidence. And didn't he bring the world banking system down? Well, as a Muslim, he would, wouldn't he?

I know this is all too easy. I wish I thought this little post was about nothing.

Sunday Night is actually Monday morning.... Fernand Leger (1)

Ballet Mecanique (1924).


Back late from London and The Battle of Ideas at the Royal College of Art. Something on that tonight.