W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #when, guiliorimondi, #eleanoroakes, #ashleyharte, #williamklein, #eugenerichards

We tend to forget that photographs can offer a report, some history, evidence of what so and so looks like.  They’re documents; they’re histories. 

Several  few years ago a bunch of photo-types were sitting around in the non-cigarette glow after one of those rare dinners for dealers, writers, teachers and actual photographers.  We were enjoying each other’s company.  It was  one of those too few occasions with no real agenda beyond showing up.  

A question arose, which we may have to attribute to the well named Susan Bright:  when do you think photography changed your life?

We were collectively considering our responses when Eleanor Oakes, told the story of finding a Polaroid among her family mementoes.  It was photograph of her father who had died when she was little.  There weren’t a lot of pictures of him so it was an unusual discovery. When she looked at it, she saw that her mother had written “Last photo of Chris.  Taken by Eleanor”. He died shortly afterwards.*1

This had a big impact on us.  We were moved by the power of the story and of the event — the way in which a photograph can distill all the feeling of a moment into a huge weight. 

I am sure that the rest of us chimed in with our various responses to “when?” as the evening wore down but it was Eli’s fast response that sticks in my head still.

The next day I called Susan B. and asked did she want to collaborate on a book of “When?”  It would be fun working together, etc.  “No” but I should feel free to do it myself with her blessing

Unsystematically I began asking photographer friends and others for their answers to the “when?” question.  Actually the question itself went through many iterations, in my attempts trying to refine it.  

If photography changed your life, when did that happen?

One of the people I sought out was Eugene Richards who is, for me, the great documentary photographer.  He is the real deal.  

His answer had an O. Henry *2 irony or ambiguity to it that took me awhile to sort through.  I wanted his answer to be that he felt with a camera he could address all the social ills that confronted him and that he wanted to remedy.  His answer was actually that his mother gave him a camera, “a 35mm camera, a second-hand Exacta that I’d seen on sale in the window of a photo finishing shop, and desired not for the way it functioned—I had little idea how this or any other camera worked—but for the way it looked, all burnished metal and mystical appearing, the speeds and f-stops engraved on it like hieroglyphics”.

Reading more deeply I discovered that his mom, who lived for her sons, couldn’t really afford such a camera, so she “hid away a bit of money from her five-dollars-an-hour housekeeping job so I could get whatever I wanted for my birthday.”*3

I think of him documenting scenes of poverty and despair in black and white so this color landscape illustrated here is unusual, but it draws on so many American ideas of wind swept plains and big open skies, the idea of the American road trip here ending in a place of transience.  This is his “North of Keene, North Dakota” from “The Blue Room” series.

There is an idea worth reporting on, the notion that this is references painters like Edward Hopper and even Grant Wood.  Often photographic works are misguidedly described as painterly which most often seems to indicate that the image is out of focus.  In fact, what is achieved is something that could only be achieved photographically, with clarity.  The artistry, the beauty, has all been captured here, on film in a camera .

This old wooden house appears like a vision and can be a metaphor for fragility or resilience, whatever, depending on how you may choose to read it.  

It is also a damned good looking picture of a house.

I asked a wide range of people to respond to my when question and the answers ranged from that magical moment of alchemy in the dark room when a white piece of paper would suddenly bloom with a visual report.

This memory is from the fondly remembered former student, Ashley Harte.   Here is her statement about the moment "when the light bulb clicked on”.

“On the first day we went into the darkroom and <the teacher> had trays of chemistry set up.  He told us what they were and how long to keep the paper in each, he explained a bit about how it all worked and then he asked who wanted to try their paper first. I volunteered. I removed my square from inside my coffee can and as he had told me put in it the first tray in front of me. 

"What happened then is so natural to me now I can hardly believe how I responded..The paper went into the developer and almost immediately a ghostly image began to appear. I gasped as I watched my first tiny photograph appear on the page. The focus was soft and the composition horrible, but there they were, my pine trees. One piece of paper, some light, and then some chemicals and I had a photograph. I was so excited I almost stuck my face in the developer trying to look closer at it.  That was it for me though, I was addicted. … I was in heaven in that tiny dark room, in fact , it was the only place in my high school I felt right and safe and confident no matter what.  It was as if I had been walking in a fog and that stepping into the darkness allowed it to clear.

“For the first time something felt one hundred percent right to me. This is when I became a photographer and an artist, when I just couldn't help it. I never choose it really, I think maybe it chose me. Whatever it was, the light bulb clicked on that day, and it has been burning brightly ever since." *4

The idea that a thunder bolt-like event happens intrigues me.  Photography is “literally writing with light," and my long time working definition takes it a little further, that it is of ‘light captured — as if by magic — in two dimensions”.  

Photography legend William Klein responded to my “When?” question indicating that he had been a painter in search of a blur effect in his paintings.  He thought he might be able to achieve that photographically.  He secured a knife to a table, then hit, and that, in fact, changed his whole career.  

Here is the most stunning response I received to my “When?’ question,  “The Corner” from a young Italian photojournalist named Guilio Rimondi.

“It's not that I think so much about that day any longer, and neither I talk it over. I guess I’ve always been a delicate man. It might mean nothing to you, seems like a little thing - perhaps.

“April 11th, 2007. It was a Wednesday, my last day in Alger. It felt like Sunday because the job was done - my very first photographic mission, two months on the Arab Mediterranean. I walked down the hills where I lived to the city center. The time was quite late in the morning: beautiful veiled women gazing at me, beggars looking for coins, tailors smoking at their boutique’s front doors. I was in love that morning. Both with the city and with the brunette girlfriend I left waiting for me back home, in Italy. I entered the black market to buy a one cigarette. I walked for a coffee to the “Brasserie des Facultés”, an old time fashioned place just aside the main square. 

“It happened there, seven steps before the square’s corner. I didn’t fall, but I could not hear. The roar overflowed me. The only thing I remember hearing perfectly was the moment of purest silence after the explosion. 

“Then it was only panic. Smoke. Blood. 
“I was alive by miracle and I knew it. A firm bank wall had protected me. I had stepped on the safe side of the corner. On the other, seven steps further, everybody was dead or else dying. There was no God for me then, neither there is now, but I asked Him unroll some stairs for me to escape somewhere up in the skies. As this didn’t happen, all I could do was to run back from where I came - or else cross that corner. 

“When you are terrified, you can only be yourself at its purest, or else one gets completely detached. No way in between. To be frank this has nothing to do with photography. But photography itself means nothing to me: it’s just an alibi to approach situations in which I would never be able to get without a purpose. It is all because of life instead, and photography as the diversion for getting there. But to me they are tangled up together, to the deepest. 

“This is the way it went, I crossed that corner. 
“That corner. That corner. That corner. That corner. That corner. That corner. That corner. Seven steps.

“That corner is in my mind. And my mind can’t contain it all. 

“I shy away from talking about that. There are things I shan’t pour outside. I know it’s only me. I know I was the first, I had the scoop, I could have made it.

“I won’t go any further so please don’t ask. Same as when you tell somebody about your love. You get once again into details. 

“ ‘I understand’ says your companion. That is all you get”.*5  

This millii-second of explosion seared itself into Romondi’s head like a photograph an ultimate and uniquely “decisive moment”.  

Great photography shakes you.  That is why you keep looking.

*1 Eleanor Oakes, correspondence with the artist, 2013 

*2 O. Henry was the pen name for William Sydney Porter) — September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910, American short story writer

*3 Eugene Richards correspondence from the artist 22 Dec. 2013

*4 *Ashley Harte, correspondence with the artist Spring 2013)

*5 Giulio Romondi- correspondence with the artist 8 February 2014

©2021

#photographsfromtheunconsicous, #collectingislikerunningaroundinathunderstormhopingyoullbehitbylightning, #aphotographsogooditmakesyoufartlighting, #photographychangedmylifetitgavemeone, #when, guiliorimondi, #eleanoroakes, #ashleyharte, #williamklein, #eugenerichards