Folkcal Fraim 6
The Beginning and the End of Being Psychic Again / NYC / 2015
When I first came to New York City, I used to purposely and lightly bump into strangers on the street. Often I would bend and fold into them, hiding my camera in my gut like a football and then, as if off balance, tilt to the side and fall the way a human domino might. Or just walk straight toward someone, so close that the dance of right, left, right, left, created laughter, annoyance, or the double stumble of me into them and them into me. In either instance, I would step back or to the side or lower myself a little and shoot their reactions from the top of my head, chest, hip or the sidewalk. And always, no matter what, I ended my circus of a technique with a seemingly sincere, “Excuse me” or “I’m sorry.” None of my images ever surpassed the unpredictable wholeness of my physical interactions (many of which ended rudely with threats and near fights), nope, not a single good photograph, but those outings helped me establish the sense of having eyes on every side of my head, a surreal intuition, as well as made me comfortable (perhaps even overconfident) in crowds. Some days I was the passive and silent conductor of an orchestra of unwilling strangers and other days I was the piston engine of photographs not yet born. I used to think of a lens as a tree that could be used to climb anything.
Once you lift a camera to your face, you become very vulnerable to your surroundings—blind and extra sensory. Some photographers see things in life first, then lift the camera and take the photograph; others are always looking through the camera where all of life is already a photograph even before it becomes a photograph. Photography is an environmental art, limited only, perhaps, by the unwillingness of the photographer to accept that not only are light and life one and the same but that the contributions made by death and darkness are of equal importance. The beginner photographer has to go through stages of discovery and discovery-less training. Over time he or she can, of course, overcome certain limitations, but usually the evidence of the skill level or the energy will reveal some aspect of itself in the photograph. Led by my own fearless curiosity for seeing things, simply, as they might look in a picture, simply, and at the risk of embarrassing myself to get the shot right, I most enjoyed those instances where, if I began to bump someone, I was immediately bumped back and bumped again and again like a sort of photag-pinball learning the digital laws of Adobe Lightroom—tilt, bonus, tutorials, high score. Faster than the birth of a second, the arrival and surprise of the unexpected. Or, if I dare use a mild flash in a crowd at night (trying to be respectful regarding distance and injury), I work like a Lilly Wave attacking a sugar crystal.
Originally, it was a few photographs by Lisette Model that gave me the idea to cause a camera ruckus in a crowd, perhaps her images from “Sammy’s,” New York, (1940-44) or even, yes, her electric and superbly alive “Café Metropole,” New York, (1946). I also admired Model’s ability to choose the perfect angle or perspective from which to present her subject. In “Running Legs,” (1940–41), a man in a pinstripe suit, striped socks, and black dress shoes is running up a set of stairs. The man’s chest, arms, and hands are cut off by the left side and the top of the frame, but his photographic identity is completed, for the viewer (in nuance), by the shadow of his shoulders, head, and the beginning of his hat. His shadow has no hips, legs, or feet, as they have all been amputated by the image of the man’s right leg which appears to launch backwards out of his left knee like a dissolving wing or bolt of well-dressed lightning. But these are not the most important aspects of the photograph. The most important aspect of the image is that it looks not like the man is running away from Model and her camera, but that Model has surprised the lower half of the man by approaching from the side and is chasing him, perhaps even haunting him back into his own reality, not the reality of art. This is what I wanted: to be bumped in a busy crowd and to chase whoever had bumped me, person and shadow, beyond identity and outside the four edges of the frame.
There is an Asian woman, a recycler of plastic bottles and tin cans, who I have encountered numerous times, day and night, mostly downtown, in New York City. The West Village, Lower Broadway, West 4th, the concrete river of traffic that Houston makes between the Bowery and Little Italy. I’ve seen her in the bicycle lane, jay walking, diagonally crossing 6th Avenue, bent over a trash basket near The Strand Bookstore, and balancing her thick, clear bags of discarded treasure on a pole across her back. It’s important that she does not see me first. Why? Because she is, without any doubt, the keenest and most camera-avoidance-savvy subject that I have ever encountered. She can sense when I am near, her grace versus the absence of gravity, mine. Like a snapshot of the heavens, the moments were we were born, here's a chart of our opposing navels: I see her first or so I think. To get closer, I try, crossing my legs one in front of the other—that thing we learn from soft paws minus the hot roof. Closer, trying for under 8 feet. 7, 6, 5, 4, bam, she turns (without turning and self focusing) in my direction and tosses an end over end plastic satellite in the direction of my head, one that whizzes by my ear and (other times) over the top of my head. Once, near Panchito’s (on Minetta Street), she threw twice. Loaded and unloaded, the second serve as potent as the first. She has never hit me, but she has very good aim and the throws are always followed by a potent flock of what I assume is Chinese profanity. Shoot, throw. Throw, shoot. Curse, swear. The mistake that Raymond Burr made in Rear Window is that he didn’t swear while in the line of fire of Jimmy Stewart’s flash bulbs. I’ve snapped the before and aftermath of her throw, but I have never gotten it as I see it, every element, as I feel it, or rather as I wish it were. I wish it were real enough to be a photograph, but this particular exchange is not ready for that. Through the lens I future-see and future-feel, and sometimes the picture becomes the prediction and other times the prediction becomes the picture. The process of photography is like placing a bet on reality. One must gamble in a way that one loses to win. Windows must be broken. That’s what shooting is: many losses, ways of looking, through a pane.
To return to the numbered frame of the paragraph, magnification device in hand, to Model, and how the man holding a flag in her photograph titled “War Rally,” New York, (1941–42) is portrayed as an exterior of deeds, one might imagine, heroic and horrific, and yet protected by the photographer’s refusal to probe beyond his embodiment of the atmosphere of the event. In the black and white gallery of persons gone where still photography and silent film once agreed on everything, he may very well have previously committed an act or two (or worse) like the one in Stanley Forman’s tragically iconic photograph, “The Soiling of Old Glory,” Boston, (1976). In Model’s image the flagpole is short and vertical, and grows from the crossed arms, deep set eyes, and cheek bones that make the man’s head look as hard as a Diamond District stone. In Forman’s image, the flagpole is long and horizontal. The flag, like the misused bow hair of a string instrument, seems to want to separate from the pole, a disassociation of purpose, a cruel and crowning act. Forman’s photograph shouts, “Charge!” In response, the flagpole (like the vacant spine of Custer’s horse) yearns to be ridden into battle, but (like the one visible sideburn of this particular morsel of history) lacks a knight. Model’s Glory is a monument and an antenna. Forman’s, a residential steeple rod and injection. Both are weapons, one passively inactive and the other physically active—the word made flesh and the self…made violent—easy-to-use symbols, soiled in different gardens, but neither more or less American than the other.
The way that looking at negatives teaches one to scroll, the great technical (or sculptural) contradiction of photography is that the lens, while appearing cylinder and round, always produces a photograph that is either rectangular or square. Perhaps flight (not sight) is the goal of the surgical laser and the surge that occurs during the lens craft of transportation. For this artist, long after the pottery of personal problems have been recast in the fires of poetry, photography, performance and song, a refusal to suture the self to another self still lingers. Understandably, too, I turn to Cesar Vallejo’s Spain, Take This Chalice from Me and the first stanza of “Huaco”—
I am the blind corequenque
that sees through the lens of a wound
and is attached to the Globe
as if to a magnificent revolving huaco.
Focusing, being the great shape shifter and equalizer of angles, the form does not match the format. We ask ourselves, “Does the focusing that happens in a lens happen in the same way that the end of a tunnel can appear to either move toward or away from an eye-weary, squinting driver?” When one lifts one’s eyelids in the misnamed act of opening one’s eyes, there are no hands there to twist our sight into a perfect focus or to help it settle on an object? The work of the lens, its war with the limitations of mechanical free will, is the creation of visual, breakaway civilizations of intimacy, an entering of the mate of sight—which is why people who say they were touched by a photograph often touch photographs, tracing their fingers along the surface of the various positions within the composition, being written by it, like the act of a perfectly manicured drawing, in search of eternity, the elder fraternal twin of reality. If photography is the motionless music of photons on-paper then no photograph, photons-flattened, has ever come into our world (destined for a gallery wall or photo album) thinking of itself as just a surface or someone else’s face. The elements of the foreground field of a photograph are the destroyers of the features of a face in a portrait. Too vivid, too stereo, too acidic to replay here and now but revisit Victor Hugo’s description(s) of Quasimodo then imagine how a large format spirit catcher might reassemble the lumpy, bell-ringer as he swings from what now appears to be a gnarled, shutter release cable. Round then square then round again, a whirl. However, the lens does not possess the spirit of the camera. A lens is like theory, the ordinary made mental, a math. It has no spirit of its own, only tunnel rituals (remember Gotthard?), the downsized metaphors of magic and possession torn between the sound and silence of fitting sacred symbolism onto the face of the machine of slavery, imaging and eye-breathing the consciousness of life (and hidden meaning) through it. Mankind crossed the line (of the neutral lie) when it locked the camera, facing up, in lidded minor tesseracts like the photocopier forcing it to serve the structures of duplication, the latter being the enemy of discovery. Rome and the pyramids were probably all built (top down) in less than a day by Canon, Sharp, Ricoh, and Konica Minolta. When I was a kid and curious about the word Xerox, I asked my teacher, “Is there a photographer in there? Is he hiding? Where did he go? If we spin it around, like the magician does, will a cool lady in a sparkly dress pop out?”
Our Image Whirl (not World) is made up of many picture incubators: false copies and copiers, coping mechanisms, the paper paradise of printers pretending to be from other dimensions—ice block droids that collate, staple, single side, double side, and jam. Ideas stacked into packets and presentations for the gods of semesters, board meetings and annual reports, mere shadows assigned to mock, the shade and smell of chemicals behind the darkroom door. Life does not jam or run out of ink. It does not require toner. The behavior of rubber belt breathing, betrayed and sun-blocked by the demands of reproductive materialism, cannot be recycled by any means other than respiration. Remove the lens from the camera, cover the circular opening with your mouth and talk, then place your ear against the wet rim of the opening and listen. The living proof of life is life and, pre sent, it is always present. Its master number is not a number. It is you. And if you want to learn, really learn, how to write with light… let the lecture not the lecturer take its turn at the lectern. You are not numb or a former citizen of the sun or a former sun. You are not Saturn, sitting in a line of marketable symbols. Your heartbeat is not determined by the ring on your finger. You will never, no matter what John Szarkowski or Edith Hamilton says, photograph Atlas or Atlantis under a hood in your hood. You are not the awkwardly built, battery charger or the place on the camera where the battery is buried, not the origin of lil’ round silver energy, not the translated pages of the manual, or an intelligent integer forced by a wave or wage to be the security deposit and connection fee in the cost of living in art and (worse) with art in you.
Everyone has taken or appeared in at least one photograph, and everyone (of a certain age) will attend at least one funeral in their lives. Without photographs there would be no such thing as saved time. For the proper disposal of electric and electronic equipment, including the human body, we have the time, government-grafted onto the grid of our guided lives, to thank. For the so-called non-Street Photographer, it’s hard to trust the streets to provide, purely pictorially, if you have never provided for the streets, socially or financially. Hats off to the Street Photographer (not a term I embrace) for being a better hustler than the Spoken Word Artist (a term I am ready to replace). The fine(r) artist (in any medium) is the one who feels and feeds the medium and its members. He and she is the living participant, not the one protected by distance or the decorum of professionalism. He and she is not the shooter with the advantage of always being at the top of the tower with the best vantage point and the best equipment. He and she shoot everything without the aesthetic prejudices formed, squarely, in a round lens by lanes of culture. In the war against Personalized Discrimination, he and she advances the roll of film and changes the memory card’s artillery as a euphoric conceptualization of the coming victory approaches minus the stretched canvases and framed dates of the cult of the medic! And yet, just now, there’s a real sadness in me, a terrible hollow feeling, for anyone who has never picked up and held a really well-made print.
To move through the streets carrying as many vowels in one’s name as Manuela Alvarez Bravo, turning the honest poetry of life into public secrets, a reversal of the ultimate law of the village; it’s local, midday solitude, would those familiar and even unfamiliar with the footsteps and stops not hear the arrival of something being raised and lowered, rising and setting in their direction, Octavio Paz’s sunstone moving through Roy Kuhlman’s 3-toned labyrinth foretelling the coming onslaught of the arcade. La Malinche, La Malinche, what have you done and what have you sold to the awful wing of modernity? And though he never wrote it or said it, Paz was right: all masks and lens caps have a death wish.
Analog level thought: Day doesn’t really turn into night. It is never drained of itself. The other self of day is night and the other self of night is day. Someday, the photographer is trying to teach the poet, an in-between will return. Until then, the image maker is stuck in this lower celestial mode, constantly missing things that occur right in front of him or her only to later see these “situations of visitation” and not know what to make of them. One must learn to embrace the haunting and often disturbing results of being a blind shooter; one must field the frightening things that live at night and call to other things that live at night. Raindrops like particles. I could hear them, their cries of birth, the drops on the car and on the passing umbrellas. Photographs falling from their nests and turning into eagles made to eat concrete grass. The splatter and bubbling of little worlds, thousands of aborted flashes of electric wetness, the light meters of something other than humanity protecting its translucent shelf life from the oxygen of darkness. Under, mostly, rubber soles, the slippery wilderness of sidewalks that once moved. Babies in the picture-womb like glossy fruit. Halos and colorful angels, a spectrum of specks (tiny tech) curved in solidarity, the other half of the construct underground and visible only as an arch in the sky. Between me and the parked car, a man, no, the back of a man. For the sake of non-release form signature respect, let’s call him Mr. Decades. Into the past, without fully stopping, I stepped past myself and saw that I was carrying the same camera that I still carry. I am no longer called Thomas. I am called Tomorrow. I never saw her face, the partial head or the eye. All I saw were hands that looked like they were from different stages of the photographic realm, processing and scanning. Digital level conclusion: As a person who looks at pictures, takes pictures, and writes about pictures, it’s extremely hard to tell if the current state of photography is the beginning or the end of being psychic (and crying) again.
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.