W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #eduardsteichen, #spectral, #specular, #gordoncraig, #thereseduncan, #primocarnera

The difference between spectral and specular is shadowy.  Spectral means ghostly, incorporeal (without a body) and specular is mirror-like.  

Images resolve as they come out of the shadows into view as we focus.  

Studying theatre earlier on, I was attracted to the lighting and stage designs of Edward Gordon Craig (1872-1966).  They struck me as being stripped down to bare essentials of light and shadow, empty space and performer, all in balance. There were platforms and lots of steps in a void with back lighting and mood for days, a perfect existential setting for “Hamlet.”  The spareness is there to be filled by the action and performance and fulfilled by the spectator’s imagination.  

Isadora Duncan and Gordon Craig became lovers and proponents of the minimalist qualities of modernism.

Photographically Éduard (Edward) Steichen is here with the sister, Thérèse Duncan dancing at the Acropolis in the early 1920s. 

“She <Duncan> was a living reincarnation of a Greek nymph. Once, while photographing the Parthenon, I lost sight of her, but I could hear her. When I asked where she was, she raised her arms in answer. I swung the camera around and photographed her arms against the background of the Erechtheum. And then we went out to a part of the Acropolis behind the Parthenon, and she posed on a rock, against the sky with her Greek garments. The wind pressed the garments tight to her body, and the ends were left flapping and fluttering. They actually crackled. This gave the effect of fire.” *1

The evolution of my eye has been towards spareness.  I need very little visual information to fully respond to a photograph.  But initially I was drawn to this smoky, hazy, dreamlike quality — romantic and pictorialist — 

Sight unseen, I once bought a Weston “Hollywood” movie star portrait, a totally glorious and surreal experience.  The image is spectral indeed, with silent film star Natacha Rambova glamorously emerging from the shadows like the Clay People in “Flash Gordon”.  This was highlighted by the smoky but luminous platinum-palladium printing.  The actress seems to be posing behind a scrim.  

In the Duncan on the Acropolis portrait, the fabric flapping in the wind looks more elemental than corporeal.  

Specular and spectral meet when you consider Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre, who is actually credited as one of the inventors of photography.   A daguerreotype behaves like a mirror; it is highly polished copper sensitized to light.  The earliest images are vague at best.  

The photographic character of the Shroud of Turin for all of its amorphic play of light and shadow will always be for me a first photo.

Serendipitously consider that Daguerre came from the theatre, where he was a scene painter and presenter of diorama performances, tour-like presentations of famous places and historical events.  Enormous rolls of realistic tableaux moved past an audience; scenes had been painted on translucent paper or fabric, with some trompe l’oeil.  These were lighted imaginatively by gas lamps, there was music, et voilà, la grande illusion.  

I also like crepuscular, caliginous, and stygian.

That seems pellucid.

As ephemeral and ghostly as the Duncan portrait appears, Steichen could offer up the inverse, a solid and stolid portrait of gravity and grace in his almost oppressive portrait of the boxer Primo Carnera.  Politically this is a bone chilling image, but we get it  This is not very girly at all.  And yes, there is some Nazi signifying to this.  

In time I came to more readily respond to the clarity of later FSA artists like Edward Weston (and later to completely abstract works).  

The Shadow knows.  

*1 Edward Steichen, “Wind Fire”, “A Life in Photography”, A Life in Photography (The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Allen & Co., 1963, pl.87).

*2 The introductory line from the radio adaptation of a popular radio series “The Shadow” – "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”  The Shadow was the secret identity of Lamont Cranston, who had the power to hypnotically cloud the minds of those near him to make himself invisible.

©2021

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