The Blind Musician and the Voyeurs 7

And one more Kertész: the photograph on the back-cover of the catalogue to Eyewitness, the 2011 RA exhibition, curated by Colin, of Hungarian Photographers of the Twentieth Century, titled Circus 1920.

This, to me, is one of the most wonderful and mysterious of Kertész’s photographs. Others may be more beautiful, more distinctly surreal, more crisply observed, more melancholy or even desolate, but this photograph presents us with a mystery at the very heart of photography. Do the couple know they are being photographed? What are they both be watching? Surely there is only one fortunate knot-hole to peek through. Where is the man’s right leg? Is it hidden behind the left? And why do they need to peek through a hole? Can’t they afford tickets?

But these are merely technical issues. The deeper questions relate to the very nature of photography and our relationship to it. Why are we fascinated by it? What does it do to us? Where does it position us? What is the relationship between symbol and the moment? Between statement and implication?

Here is the poem that I called ‘The Voyeurs’.

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.

Two things struck me about the photograph when I first saw it. The couple are observing a scene of people who do not know they are being observed. That makes them voyeurs. But we ourselves are observing them observing, which makes us voyeurs too. Is there, therefore, something at the heart of photography that is, essentially voyeuristic, and, if so, is that one of the reasons it fascinates us? For are we not natural voyeurs, fascinated by exposed windows at dusk or by figures glimpsed in or from a train, rather as the James Stewart photographer figure in Rear Window is fascinated by events in neighbours’ windows? Something in the Kertész photograph, or so it seems to me, strikes close to nature. We recognise in it something of the hunter (animal or human) watching his prey (animal or human.) And what of Susannah observed by the elders in the bible or the face behind trembling lace curtains gazing out into any street?

That is one thought. The other is more disturbing. What is it that we – or this couple here – are actually wanting to see. What is the attraction of the circus? Why the fence? Why is the hole in the fence so much like the aperture of a camera? What does the space beyond represent in the imagination? Here we all are, all but invisible in the vast spaces of the galaxy, marooned at our specific, microscopic moment of time.  What is there to see?

The poem has taken the liberty of interpreting a symbolic hint in the picture. The inverted flame shape, suggested by the woman’s headscarf, is a conventional symbol of death. Even if we do not consciously interpret it as such – and I doubt whether Kertész did, or at least we do not know whether he articulated such a thought in his own mind - once the photograph opens its multitude of doors onto the fields of memory and imagination, the symbol, even though we cannot name it, begins to speak to us and organise other parts of the image into a possible coherent whole. The man’s one leg, the halo of his boater, the absoluteness of those stern planks of wood with their jagged waves at just about neck-level, combine to support the death narrative. There is nothing dramatic in the narrative itself.  Nothing is obvious: it is all apprehension, all shudder, all admiration and marvel.

The Blind Musician and the Voyeurs 6

André Kertész: Accordionist 1916

Here we have jumped back in time some thirty years from one war to the one that preceded it, from the latter stages of the Second World War to the middle of the First in 1916. It is a photograph much written about and occupies an important place in Geoff Dyer’s fine book about photography, The Ongoing Moment. I wrote a short sequence of poems about some Kertész photographs, including this one, ‘The Accordionist’:

The Accordionist

The accordionist is a blind intellectual

carrying an enormous typewriter whose keys

grow wings as the instrument expands into a tall

horizontal hat that collapses with a tubercular wheeze.

My century is a sad one of collapses.

The concertina of the chest; the tubular bells

of the high houses; the flattened ellipses

of our skulls that open like petals.

We are the poppies sprinkled along the field.

We are simple crosses dotted with blood.

Beware the sentiments concealed

in this short rhyme. Be wise. Be good.

But the accordionist is not blind. Dyer quotes the first verse of the poem and notices this. He says:

“The accordion, it seems, is such a potent symbol of sightlessness as to blind us – I too had assumed he was blind – to the real condition of the person playing it” and then refers to a 1959 photo by Kertész of a blind accordionist in New York as well as to other photographs of possibly blind accordionists by Ben Shahn and Walker Evans. For me, I suppose, the photograph’s undercurrents lay in the date, 1916. Once again the document served as more than document: it was a harbinger of sorts. The bombed landscape in the poem resembles a collapsed accordion, skulls turn into poppies and something is undermining the ready-made sentiments we apply to the war, the very sentiments that are “concealed in this short rhyme”.

Kertész’s career started in the First World War and established him as one of the great innovators of photography. He learned a great deal from Lartigue, but extended the joy and light of Lartigue into the melancholy, dark comedy of the Hungarian condition. In order to explore this I want to introduce two more Kertész poems, based on his work of this early period.

Here is the first, from a series of photograph-poems commissioned, once again, by the Barbican Gallery at the time of their In the Face of History: In Time of War exhibition of 2006 (I wrote and recorded twelve poems for it, the poems appearing in The Burning of the Books (2009).

André Kertész: Latrine 1915

Kertész: Latrine

1

Four poilus in a wood austerely shitting.

Death watches them, laughing, its sides splitting.

Life is a cry followed by laughter. The body before, the waste after.

2

Could one hear in that wood the gentle click

of the shutter like the breaking of a stick

or the safety catch on its climacteric?

3

Like the four winds. Like a low fart that rips

clean air in two, like urine that drips.

Four squatting foot soldiers of the Apocalypse.

4

Kiss them lightly, faint breeze in the small leaves,

be the mop on the brow, the sigh that relieves.

Let them dump and move on into the dark plate

of the unexposed future, too little and too late.

The photograph suggests comedy and tragedy at once. It is like the comic scenes in the tragedies of Shakespeare: the porter in Macbeth or the Fool in Lear. It is as if the mechanicals of A Midsummer Night’s Dream were shown preparing for their more savage, darker roles in World War 1 by taking, what W H Auden called, ‘a good dump’. These soldiers are less lyrical than Escher’s 1940 trooper about to set off to a briefly recovered homeland: they are knockabout figures, bowling pins lined up on what appears to be a fallen tree trunk while Kertész, himself a soldier, was lugging his heavy photographic equipment around with him like a sui generis war photographer.

André Kertész: Self portrait, Görtz, 1914

The Blind Musician and the Voyeurs 5

Escher: Bank Manager at the Public Baths, 1938

I want briefly to look at two more Escher images before passing on. This is the famous Bank Manager at the Public Baths of 1938.

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Neither seal nor merman, this corpulent figure is, nevertheless, something other than a portrait. He is a stereotype but so perfectly pitched that he transcends stereotype. He is not merely a concrete example of a lay figure, one likely to have found his way into one or other concentration camp where he might have been exterminated some four years after the photograph was taken but, as with the young soldier, he is also a symbol at a deeper level. Of what, I am not sure. Not merely mortality. Symbols are not easily definable, but it seems clear that, at some level beyond the vulnerability associated with mortality, he symbolises money and its offices,  a mixture of power and vulnerability. His arms are stretched out either side of him as in a crucifixion but he looks out at us, confronting us directly, even pulling a face for us, with an expression that is part comical, part contemptuous. His face, body and position arouse feelings in us that lie close to the root of who we are and what we are. I last saw his image on the Gents door of the Budapest restaurant that used to be the bank of which our floating banker was manager. Like the Dude in the film, The Big Lebowski, the image of the banker abides.

And lastly this image of a blind musician in 1944, the year the Germans marched into Hungary and the year the Holocaust deportations began in earnest.

Károly Escher: Blind Musician, 1944

That information is not in the photograph of course. Information of that sort rarely is nor would I want to pile too much baggage on the poor musician’s back but his wide open mouth seems to be bellowing something we almost hear. The angle at which he is shot, and the framing, destabilise him as much as they do the viewer who is effectively tipped sideways into his world. Once again, as in all great photographs, the photographer has seen or sensed a field beyond the subject. He too has been tipped over. We are not sure whether to call this a portrait or a social document. It is much more than either.

I would like this photograph to act as a bridge to another photographer, possibly the greatest of Hungarian photographers, in fact more than that, possibly the greatest photographer of all, André Kertész.


[to be continued]

The Blind Musician and the Voyeurs 4

Let us look at more of Escher’s work. Here is Soldier Entering the Re-Annexed Territories (1940). The soldier is probably marching into Transylvania just as my mother is considering leaving it. The caption in The Hungarian Connection catalogue called it Soldier Going to the Front and dated it 1947 which clearly cannot have been the date of the photograph since there was no ‘front’ in 1947. War was over. In any case, the photograph was the subject of a poem in my 1988 book, Metro, so is likely to have been based on the exhibition or the catalogue. Here is the poem:

A Soldier

(after Károly Escher)

A young man with two flowers in his cap

Has turned away across the platform

To move towards two women wearing headscarves.

He is the country I am leaving.

He is beautiful, a beast decked and garlanded,

He stands gently and placidly, tall, slim,

Melancholy, prepared for sacrifice,

A peasant soldier, simple as they come.

Death has half closed his eyes

Ready to devour him at a blinking.

Behind his head the blur of a wagon pulling out.

He seizes one of the women, embraces her,

Presses himself against her.

As we depart I am tempted to shout

To attract his attention. I can only guess

The occasion of his death, his tenderness.

I must have believed the caption regarding his preparedness for the front and discounted the date as an aberration because I saw in him a sacrificial beast prepared to fight, from my point of view, on the wrong side – in other words supporting the Nazis – yet somehow as a symbol of something innocent and tender. The two women with the headscarves are behind him and nobody is embracing. The embrace has either happened or will happen. I think it was some quality of the photograph that caught my attention and produced the embrace, something rooted in the specific moment (though not the specific moment I had thought) but extended beyond into a symbolic field I could only sense not describe. The poem had been launched into that field by the photograph. Had I known that the young soldier was not heading into battle but towards the repossession of historical territories it would probably have meant something else, something more complex, rousing other feelings and thoughts.

The photograph is a document yet so much more. Much of Escher’s early work between the wars was in fact documentary, recording poverty of the Thirties for example as in his Evicted Tenants (1934)

Escher: Evicted Tenants (1934)

and Slumhouse in the Suburbs (1932). 

Escher: Slumhouse in the Suburbs (1932)

The subject in these photographs is so powerful the symbolic level is pressed a long way back. Such photographs are very valuable as works of sociology, registering a phenomenon. They are part of a job recording something that needs to be recorded with an eye to the most powerful image. They are, in that respect, not without a symbolic aspect but the condition of the subjects reminds us that they are suffering specific conditions at a specific time.  They are a social cause that should be addressed. But there is more. There is always more.

How much more there is and what that more actually is is the question that arose for me when asked by the Barbican Gallery to write about certain photographs by Sebastaio Salgado. The exhibition formed itself a question for me. At what moment does misery become beauty? Is beauty that something more? 

Sebastaio Salgado link: The Mines of Serro Pelada, 1986

It is an uneasy, faintly queasy feeling confronting such images as aesthetic objects.