Folkcal Fraim 1
Facial Flesh Is Its Own Flash / TSE / 2019
I thought I’d begin this new column with an image of a face because faces are everywhere and on everything and no one gets to choose his or her or its own face not even the camera — even Eliot chose Prufrock’s, even the mask chose Dunbar’s. A face is the only part of the human body, as we know it, that contains all of the orifices that enable all five human senses. In this regard it is no wonder that it is, some say, our first individual headquarters or control system. But where do faces come from — the places before us, the places before ageless poetry and un-aimed photography or have they not come yet?
I am not a photographer, well, I’ve never felt like one, but I am someone filled with other someones who carries and uses a camera among many other someones as they fill and empty themselves becoming and unbecoming themselves. Is there film in me, certainly I am exposed and still developing, unrolled from a small can and placed in the fallen light of an enlarger. Some never make it to either place and, quite often, a camera of some sort is there in front of them or between people to add to this very human mode of interruption. Just now, while typing, I am made aware — yes “made” — of a period when I lived in Brooklyn, New York, and would take off my glasses and shoot with what I used call then: my natural sight. I would not call it that today because I don’t believe there is such a thing as natural sight. But, in those days, without my glasses, I think I came close (only once) to properly refereeing the scrimmage line between lens and line break. And that particular image, coaxing in a few of the so-called visual aspects or the pictorial evidence of earthly divinity, appears on the cover of The Road to Emmaus (Spencer Reece / FSG / 2014). Whenever I see that image, now, I am convinced that we live in the thinnest of water, oxygen, as well as between (above and below) purer waters. Can a cameRA teach this?
I try not to hide my camera in public. I don’t care if the subject sees it, why not, the camera sees him or her or them or rather I see them through it. I don’t, however, always raise it to face anymore and since my camera does not have an auto-focus setting, I simply set the distance in advance and guess at the appropriate time to push the button. My camera is usually lowered to the position of my hip (hip-eyes), hanging wrist (wrist-retinas) or belly (aperture-appetite). In the case of Facial Flesh Is Its Own Flash, pictured above, the man and I made eye contact with one another as I moved toward and beyond him on the NYC Subway. This encounter began with me sitting across from him. I was surprised at how long he held his hand on his face and I was immediately reminded of the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing when Policeman Randy Kennan slaps George Peatty, something in the way the fingers move the flesh upward toward a new sculptural of the purpose of touch was like a slow flash to me. Where was his face going when it was me who was exiting the train?
The people we leave on trains, contact sheets, negatives, digital files and on gallery walls and exhibition catalogs, never (truly) seem to be going anywhere without the aid of the matrix of f-stops, so it would seem that Photography (the camera) is not just “a way of seeing” as Susan Sontag says in “Photography: A Little Summa” (from At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches / FSG / 2007) but a way of detouring or changing the route of a part of the face of someone’s destiny, their profile folder on the desk top of folders where the camera with its own hot shoe God of Thunder is the enemy of the screen it now owes its popularity to. I’ve gotten in a few fights, arguments, while out taking and being given photographs but nothing so serious that I have had to swing my metal camera like a hammer. The camera chooses a face of the faces (of yours) that you did not choose. And throws it on you, why, because a face is fate.
Saturday, November 2, 2019 The Sunshine State
Poet, photographer, professor and bandleader Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of The Maverick Room and Skin, Inc. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective and The Dark Room Reading Series in 1989 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He has taught in various Universities and published, both poems and photographs, in numerous journals, including The Paris Review, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010, 2015). In 2015, he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a literary free Jazz band of artists who were awarded the American Book Award for Oral Literature in 2018. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry. His latest book Crank Shaped Notes was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2021. TSE was recently named the first Photo Laureate of St. Petersburg, Florida.