Folkcal Fraim 7
Two Detonations in the Trenches of Darkness Lit Like Eyes / Cambridge, MA / 2013
One of the purposes of the camera, not of photography, is to separate the emotional content of the posed (stillness and peace) from the physical vocabulary of the unposed (motion and conflict). If a subject can be said or seen to possess a body and a spirit, then it is the goal of the photographer to explore and reveal the grid of agreement and disagreement between them; and the conflicting goal of the apparatus, whether or not the manufacturers realize it to limit the exploration and thus stalling the overall maturity or the full possibility of the artform in life. Such aesthetic battlefields are devastating and almost never have as their goal the negotiation of a reunion or the nurturing of a merger for future work. However, neither deed can be accomplished––not within our spectral field––without the cooperation of the descriptive and often counterintuitive forces of light and darkness. Both are essential and neither must seek a foundation of dominance over the other or adopt the stance that it (and not the other) came first as neither is truly native to the medium. Just as every military medal shouts Prometheus, no body of light ever escaped the dark age of a photographic black hole. Photography cannot write with light without the aid of darkness and darkness cannot be written on without the quicksilver qualities of light. Every photograph, being an eye of time, is at first an experiment of pre-experience. And photography, as we know it today, cannot experience the mass mythologizer known as time, without assistance from the atmospheric cycle of our circle environment, the tropic of light and the tropic of darkness. These two elemental siblings, spectral twins, are the angels of aura that every landscape luddite and snapshot carnival barker must surrender to the moment the camera attempts a canticle.
But what if the two, the lit and the unlit, were at odds with one another or were made to be perceived (by those individuals who photographically depend on them) as opposing forces or staged performances of craft like the painted string disguised as rain in certain fabricated photographs? What would such an ideological divide mean for the various shades of relief in photorealism, documentary photography, and reality photography––the realm of photography practiced after the advent of Photoshop which is similar to the realm of poetry practiced after the institutionalization of the Writing Workshop. Given all of the cries for "keeping it real," one wonders if the reproduction of representations of reality might need a break from its own reservoir of poured cement reality where the artillery of red flags, white flags and blood cells dominate recognizable experience. Shoot in raw or shot in war, the staging of photographs is common and double-agent-necessary. In fact, I hereby name the camera as the first crisis actor apparatus of the modern era. Here's something that dropped into the negative carrier of my mind years ago while I was holding a pan of demonically-scented fluids: the purpose of reality is to reproduce itself, but the purpose of reproduction is to deduct itself from the original producer, technically known as the ventilator of the enlarger or life. Once internalized as a medium indistinguishable from magic, magic indistinguishable from mind control and mind control indistinguishable from mass murder, would the conflict between light (good, a god) and darkness (evil, a devil) normalize itself as artistic expression within a sorcery of sorts once reliant on the sensitivity of dry plates––toy wheel of life as trope, a Zoe, one of those sad mechanical rooms of thought, a crypto elitism, that only art can come in and out of. And here we are again in the digital age (in yet another collapsing house of taste) digging our own grave while a camera on a tripod (timer set) takes a very wide image of the photographer (and his line of assistants) all diving in.
There’s no mysticism or the experience of mysticism anywhere in the scanning process, which is why each layer of the social overlap appears to be a daydream in some areas and a nightmare in others, both simultaneously moving toward and away from any idea of an exchange of order within the sealed system. We like and dislike different photographs for different reasons but rarely do we identify (or blame) the spiritual forces that make their way (via technical magnetism) into the photograph, those qualities that enter (by way of the mind of the photographer and the photographic process) the territory of the frame and transfer themselves into the energy of composition in the guise of perspective, content, tone and contrast like an elixir akin to a combination of spirit and soul acting as a glue, blood to body, with an electrical sealant or bond, neither positive or negative, acidic in the nectar as fixer, the X-patents, X-files and expatriates of the marvelous, shiny side. And although one might disagree with the material results of a specific photograph, aim and angle, very few viewers have ever looked at a photographic image and thought to call a critical or pleasure-inducing truce between its dying ball turret gunner and the almost outstretched arms of Napalm Girl––two nuanced testaments to the spiritual tragedy of war, things slightly out of the reach and out of focus by one eye but felt, in full oculus, by the other. Being a poet, I have never, during the act of being possessed by looking, attempted to personify then interrogate a shutter ghost for haunting a subject I was trying to coax into the frame because that would have been like trying to chart the geometry of an ache or an itch after a volute has lost its stone iris. Finger-summoned, the apparition must be given full reign of the aperture. As much a product of the continuance of creation as I am, I have also never turned my eyelids inside out, plucked out an eye, untwisted the lens, removed either side of the glass, and placed my eye in the battalion of the barrel. I have thought about it several times but found the hard, plastic lens cap a poor substitute for an eye patch or a German monocle, even if the molecules in the lenses change shape when exposed to radiation. Vacublitz, a blitzkrieg. After the flash, the shelter falls out, then your hair, and they say your eye sockets leak; nor have I read by another poet or essayist an organized clay of writing in which the speaker has traveled the world collecting the discarded bodies of cameras, metal and plastic, and hammered those bodies into an altar or something like a body-sized old box capable of turning the breathing of sleep into the plant material of Serial Photography, that well-trimmed garden and park system originating in the housing complex at the top of a reflexive landscape of singularity, ring still linked to the saluted subject beneath the hood, the old normal of para non normal, a masked nomadic normalcy of processing lab secrecy.
The fo(lk)cal fr-aim way is to let the mind move through the paragraph as if turning the pages of a portfolio, the dominant role played by pictorial writing, not writing about pictures––a shutter speed dial attached to the essay whose f stops (size of opening) are stations of verse, free and formally struck (not strict), at war with the photorealistic prose quality of easy, essay paragraphs. Having what are often called “Soft Eyes,” you can coat the paper (like a searchlight patrolling ghetto darkness) from any political or cultural view you want. When color was fugitive, the spirit was ignorant of its own spectrum, but not aggressively unpeopled or beyond the skill level of a well-organized attack or shiny boot review. From daybook to night companion, from journey to journal, the soul of a photograph resides in the resolution, in the expository meditation, in the metaphysical aspects of the march (of the troops) to the front line––like paragraphs that open before they chute. With a camera, I can (basically) train you to believe anything, and with a photograph I can discharge you after changing what you already believe. And, because the uniform is inner-formed, over time, I began to look like a photographer. O to be the puddle yearning to consume a leap. O to open the Country Doctor’s bag and discover, forever unbeknownst to W. Eugene Smith, the proof in pre-photos that photography existed long before the camera. O to be hushed and chased away from the window of a Watcher by an androgynous broom elder, silver-eyed and weary from constantly swatting the administers of racist doll tests, the child in the famous photograph neither confused or shaped by the choice between soulless toys and having avoided The Family of Man Exhibition (MoMA, 1955) thinks that the colors of all physical avatars, hers included, are as coated as candy. In military time, an image salutes the viewer and the viewer obeys the flatness of the order. Flags covering caskets on the cover of Life. An amazing time for a five-star general to grace Time. You a gene but even Atget was an actor. Thus, war appears to be the most darkness an individual can imagine; and love (or peace) the most amount of light imaginable, although both have been tampered with by various special interest groups (some of which use the same banks as international photographic cooperatives and modeling agencies––war poets and war photographers, the torchbearers of art and news alike. An eye, a glitzy stye. The height of the unseen religious image is a miracle (or Creation) and the height of the unseen war image is the path of a bullet (or a body being blown to pieces). Neither are common and both have been regulated to the land of the stroboscope where the smoke of an enormous magnesium flash clears, revealing the majesty of a milk drop imitating a white crown then making a crater-like splash onto a vivid red allusion to Mars. Perhaps it is the mixed effect of reconnaissance acts of art like Harold Edgerton’s Bullet Through Apple, speedlight-aided and “using a battery to discharge a recurring high-voltage current into a gas filled tube,” that make it not only possible to (visually) stop time but to coerce it into a stylized servitude.
Staring upward at a negative into natural light is a very different way of viewing the grand tour of souls on a strip of film than staring down at it through a loupe on a light table. While the method of the former is divine, the method of the later is clinical; and, on the whole, less enlightened than the gaze toward ascension. If the upward gaze or line of sight through and beyond the negative is an act of worship, perhaps the downward gaze is an act of prayer––in both cases (perhaps due to an absence of faith) the bony cup of glass, sliding across the cave wall of film like a deity of scrutiny, suppresses thought. The case for in-camera and after-camera reincarnation: You take a photograph. It travels to the negative (or memory card). You print the image from either a negative or a digital file. You reproduce the print. You email the digital file. The photograph is alive and not alive but not quite visually deceased––electronic and pixel-built. It lives in different sizes, in different frames, in various galleries, on book covers, CD covers, desktops, postcards, t-shirts, buttons, etc. It lives again and again and again, mostly unchanged until it encounters human preference, human alteration and human dominance. And yet I wonder about these new humans and future humans who no longer crave eye contact, private or public, with someone other than themselves. Confession: I have never snapped my fingers like a snapshot after a poem, nor have I had fingers snapped for me after reading a poem. A tale of two audiences (I suspect). When all-White, the academic crowd sits in silence with its eyes closed; when all-White with a few Black listeners sprinkled in, the Blacks conform to the environment of the event; when all-Black, academic or otherwise, the room becomes a congregation unleashing Amen Corners ––left and right, light and dark; when all-Black with a few Whites in attendance, no, that never happens. What is it about the act of snapping fingers, knuckles popping, after hearing a poem in a dark room that reminds me of camera flashes? The mind drifts through its mental photo album landing on the still photography in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, the energy of the character known as Paparazzo (from which the term Paparazzi is derived), the pursuit of picture after picture, a light bringer even in daylight, Icarus in Italy in his pre-prime, so many bulbs burned before the flash holder goes limp. If the reader at the podium is epileptic, an ill-timed flash can trigger an episode and throw the performance off or cause a car crash in a tunnel in Paris. Thus, a loss of innocence that results in a low Slam score. It used to be so dark in the basement of the Cantab Lounge where the low wattage of urban metaphors sat at the bar in poems like candle-lit beers.
No shutter speed ever came close to the speed of spirit, neither entering or leaving the body, no fraction of a second can compare to the Welcome to the Ether that a last breath receives. It weighs so little, less than nothing, and wins every race. Except for the last breath, all breathing is in-time. The last breath exists outside of time, does not adhere to time, math, or sound. Its allegiance is to other bodiless breaths. Greater now, it is no longer an engine of respiration. The space between what is seen and the pursuant shutter speed knows this. Speed limit law breaker returning to the scene of the spa in space like a comet shot through healing water, sometimes electric, sometimes wet. Those things, those invisible obscura objects of desire that fly from the smokestack of the lens or the long lens extending from the face of a tank. Studio so asylum-pristine the harsh, white doctor’s coat convinces the shadows to bounce, imperfect as they are in middle gray, yet, eternal. So many blue angels assisting exposure, none an adversary or an invader from the East, none a solid gold trophy or dancer. Shadow of the plate (or bowl), shadow of the tines, shadow of the fork and the triangular absence of appetite in between. The international date line, line of demarcation, between victim and torturer, is like a doll within a doll holding a hair light within a doll beneath a beauty dish within a doll in mismatched diffusion socks. So shunned is the camera that returns to its village without a capture. No carcass, no caricature. So stunned are the villagers and the curator. Nothing in the viewfinder worthy enough to be hidden or hung as high as a trophy hide and yet, over time, one begins to think of the clear, glass cage as a gateway of possibility and privilege. Look! Another artist helping the poor peasants! Over time one comes to think of access as the canvas and assignment as the paint brush––like you did not know that Naturalism, with its ability to justify wounds and its larger and bloodier thirst for color, would replace Romanticism? As soon as an invention becomes a medium, a possessor of men, it runs the risk of becoming a religion in the hearts of those told they need saving. The artillery and the artillery manufacturer both disguise themselves as treaties of self defense. Workshop and Photoshop. The poet wonders where photography was before the birth of the camera and the photographer wonders where poetry was before the birth of the poem. If I focus at infinity using a distorter of truth much like a magnifying glass, fully opened and squinting (just a little) toward an inch by an inch and half of eternity, I’ll probably never get there, why, because light and darkness do not mate. They merge. And the best merger, like the best sleep, is dreamless.
A woman is seated at a table. The table is white but I would prefer that it was black, why, because I don’t want it to act as a reflector. I want it to be absorbent or rather: resistant––a flat, hard, insatiable sponge, the kind of surface that the organic stones within elbows can trust. Sitting across from her, and most mobile in manual, sometimes I stand. Moving to the left, the right, backing away, bending; and leaning in. The darkness surrounding this little Operation has been converted to covert like the interior of this room now camouflaged by night, solid and an extension of the hue of Nothingness. No solar lid or can opener of rotating luminance can remove the artificial contours of this black abyss. The lights must be turned off, a few nocturnal notches beneath off, if possible. There is a camera between us, a lens cloth and a few lens––a 90mm and 35mm, silos of length and width. The lens attached to the camera is a 50mm. A whole generation of readers, phone-camera users, and point-and-shooters have forgotten that we were once able to twist the lens off of the face of the camera. Mother of the divine Godhead, show us your soul, inner and otherworldly. I once knew a man who thought that Napoleon’s troops shot the sphinx before its lens had a chance to ever become a nose. I travel with a lamp, one with a heavy round base, an urn (if you will) of weight, my torch of not enough liberty and just enough battle cry. A sort of anatomical bayonet, it is made of metal and resembles a skeletal replica of the human arm with a folding wrist and an open cone-like neck brace that holds and protects the head of the bulb. Sometimes you need four types of umbrellas (Reflective, Shoot Through, Parabolic, and Softbox) for one type of rain of light. Halogen, the halo of genesis. The lamp has two settings––bright like blinding and lunar like lightning; one position of the switch produces the greater light and the other produces the lesser light. I cannot deny the surface, makeshift intensity of this pop-up, photographic interrogation room, and if she sweats under the light, the Noir will be complete. How easy it would be to ask her to make a face and point a toy gun at the camera, but that’s been done, same as twelve cameras and twelve stanzas along a race track, abcabc, a constant rhyme scheme of sextets in full gallop. Groundbreaking or not, it’s all been done. Resting on her mid nostril and between her lips, I knew the elastic ring taken from the dark side of her head would mistake air for hair. We are all prisoners of photography. Windows closed, blinds down. Her profile glowed like the lunar (some say plasma) surface of the moon. And, occasionally, her skin appeared inner lit. It was while making such a portrait that I realized that I have never been in complete darkness, and I admit that I have never ordered moon dust to focus or for clarity. Shortly after The Horse in Motion (1878) and long before Poetry in Motion (1992), I willingly took my ego off of the contact sheet. I did it as a result of the confusing skies created by combination printing, the surface profile, the altered literacy.
One of the most well-known images of war has no people in it. It consists of a landscape or a desolate road of cannonballs and bone-like rocks. The cannonballs resemble skulls, and the road is perhaps never-ending. The universe, a graveyard of grounded orb and globes. The stillness is eerie and the viewer, with a photographic interest in the scene behind what is allowed to be seen, might wonder if the Russian soldiers who, during the Crimean War, shot at Roger Fenton’s white photographic van mistaking it for an ammunition wagon, were more adept and knowledgeable than Fenton was in the arts of soul collection and the even darker rituals and reasons for war. Before it was a lit hurt heart, the earth was an unlit hard head. Sucked in by aperture and the spiraling bullet and bomb holes of conflict, we write with light but the true page of the world, darkness, is what we write on (and away from), the terra forma of underdevelopment, loss without a place to settle, delete button too close to White Balance, the near death of the constant experience of becoming something less than portable while being exhaled from the mind of God.
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.