In the Cavern
And all the time, something else may be happening, something to do with blindness, with lack of direction, as a route to realisation.
I took the picture in the Gorbals around 1966. I have just discovered the negative, which I don’t think I ever printed. It was probably disregarded as of little interest. But now I see it in a very different light. For me this image has magic.
I don’t recall my state of mind when I took the picture. I think it was probably the girl on crutches that was the subject because I have some close-ups of her playing hopscotch, which were printed. Those prints, however, are nothing compared with the one I overlooked.
As a piece of photojournalism, it records a way of life and has a certain pathos. The street is the only playground these children have. They live in tenements, or closies, and wear hand-me-down clothes. The close-mouth probably stank of cats’ piss. The street is also the everyday setting for women in coats and headscarves and shopping bags, hurrying to the corner shop run by an elderly couple or an eccentric old maid.
On the street, 1966
But this image is something else besides. It has, however, to be seen much enlarged to be appreciated, for then the grain takes over and the secrets begin to creep out of the dark and swim together. The distortion of the 28mm lens contributes to the mystery of the space.
Two things strike me then. The first thing is how the identifiable figures in the image become unknown- seen for the first time. But more curious is the merging of animate and inanimate objects that takes place. The sense is of arrested movement (not just stopped by the speed of the shutter), so that the plane of the photograph becomes a tableau.
I get the same eerie sense I get from a particular painting by Balthus: La rue, from 1933-35, and also sensed, if my memory serves me, in the slow- motion footage of Jean Cocteau’s Le Testament d’Orphee. The archetypal aura of Raymond Mason’s marvellous bas relais: Carrefour de l’Odeon is also around.
The accentuated grain turns the tableau into tapestry in which the waste paper in the gutter has as much value as the little waifs standing in the middle of the road, or the gloomy immemorial buildings, like the inn in the top left corner. All this was unwitting, not consciously present at the time I took the picture; present, I choose to believe, to the inner eye, an example of seeing blind.
In the end, I don’t know what I am seeing here. In the Mandaka Upanishad it is written – gnaw the knot of ignorance. For spirit, according to Hinduism, is to be found in the cavern.
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About
July 2006
Through a glass darkly is my metaphoric allusion to looking through the lens of a camera, awaiting the psychological moment (in the dark). It is also the title of an Ingmar Bergman film I saw a long time ago, and because of one scene in that film, I always remember it: a view of a northern lake in the midnight sun hypnotises the camera. I hold that scene within like a communication with an unknown self. Perhaps had I something of the imaginative grasp of Robert Musil, there’d be no need to take photographs. Here is part of a sentence from his strory The Perfecting of Love: “now and then it happens that one sees something in the distance, an unfamiliar thing and walks towards it, and at a certain point it enters into the circle of one’s own life; but the place where one was before is now strangely empty.”
To the woods
It is, of course, a phrase, from 1 Corinthians 13, followed there by another phrase: “face to face” as a now-and-then, a before-and-after. So, as usual, quite a process is constellated in the space between. This web-space, to an extent represents, a space between. Images are one of the things that tag to such happenings, words also, but ineffably, in one way or another, meaning eludes one.
And now a picture to hold that space.
I think my search for meaning in empty spaces may partly derive from growing up in a culture of mystification. Walker Percy has an interesting slant on this. It is pivotal to his novel The Moviegoer? I’ll have more to say about Binx Bolling sometime. By the way, I am Lyon, hence Leo. I am called that after my father who died when I was five. The woman in my imagination is Lyones after a character in Arthurian legend. Anyway what interests me is the meaning that momentarily emerges from the subliminal choices that register the activity of imagination – in an apparition, or a form of words, perhaps in the threatening surprises of a psychoanalysis – when I sense myself prompted towards a reality other than what I was thinking was real, the way of being I was accustomed to. It seems like a moment of acceptance of aloneness, not such that instills despair, but rather suggests a precarious balance above an abyss of unknowing, an insupportable freedom. In the next breath perhaps, he says, Musil, that is, ” a moment always comes that is like an abyss, and, left behind at its brink, there stands a sick person whom one does not know and who is gradually fading from sight.”
The next picture is from the spring of 1986 – a rusty incinerator aboard the crane barge Thor in the Fortes Field 140 miles offshore in the North Sea.
21 August 2006
And now I’m picking up the thread again. And time has passed. And a phrase has come to mind: an image darkly forming is the phrase. It is the title of a book, and a Jungian might well take it as a metaphor for individuation. Jung thought of the progress of the soul as a night sea journey; he talked of Jonah and the whale. It is not a metaphor, however, when used another way, as a rather nice way of referring to the photograph: an image forming in the dark, first in the split-second piercing of the dark inside the camera, then developing in the dark of a tank and at last in the obscure light of the darkroom, and before all that, conceived in the dark processes of the mind’s eye. I want to use it in another sense to mark a trend in my interest in picture taking. I mean an image formed of the dark. Brassai’s Paris by night, has the glossy magic of the sensuous and romantic dark.
Prostitute at angle of Rue de la Reynie and Rue Quincampoix From “Paris by Night” 1933
In contrast, there is an image by a young Israeli photographer that cast a spell on me very different from that of the brilliance of the dark of Gyula Halasz Brassai. Sensuous, yes, but there is nothing sensual or romantic in Calanit Schachner’s picture. It takes me back to being a boy sitting in the darkened local cinema and being confronted by the unthinkable, moving black and white pictures of the relief of Belsen on the Gaumont British News. That this had been going on at the same time as my everyday life as a schoolboy! What I couldn’t get out of my head was the footage of the interior of the crematorium. And people can deny that these terrible things ever happened!
Space 5 (from Attic)
It is the image darkly forming that I am drawn to if somehow to try and understand my fascination with it. And so – into the dark.
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leo photophile 
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The above photo On the street 1966, the girl in the photo on crutches is my sister. If this is 1966 she would be 14yrs old. I was so surprised when i seen it.
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