Tuesday Reads: Teju Cole
Encompass © David Paige
“Not when I was photographing, but later, in considering the images, I remembered the line from Paul Éduard’s: “There is another world, but it is in this one”.”
The quest for a confirmation of the existence of another dimension, parallel to this world, has been going on for millennia. Such a quest is precisely what brings together, for instance, religion, art, chemistry, physics and extreme sports. No matter how beautiful and varied our planet proves to be on a daily basis, human nature pushes us to look for more. Convinced that another world, though not in plain sight, can be reached through exploration of our reality, artists have pursued this thirst for spirituality over the years. Could photographers be exempt from such human need for fantasy? Of course not.
Beach bubble. Andalucia, Spain, July 2013 © Emma Hardy
Walking on the thin but sharp line between being confined to reality and enacting imagined scenes, photographers are pushing the boundaries between dreams and reality through the most groundbreaking exploration of our world. Being well aware of the potential of the camera to flip perspectives and twist the relationship between objects, photographers can exploit the visual naïveté of our eyes in order to bolster our imagination. Photography becomes a tool to enlarge our mental perspectives, departing from the weakness of our vision.
A soap bubble becomes, respectively, the symbol of social isolation, the means for a human to float in the sky, the representation of fantasy or the comforting motherly womb around a newborn’s body. A ray of light becomes the magnifier of an otherwise disregarded detail, the portal to a long-lost memory or the only way out from a tunnel of desperation. Basically, objects maintain their nature and, at once, become symbols. Specific humans still carry their uniqueness while being elevated to a universal role.
Though the child in that bubble is still Andrew to those who know him, he is the brother you lost due to COVID-19. He is your creative and flimsy neighbor. He is your lazy but oh-so-lovely cousin. He is whomever your imagination needs him to be. An eye printed on a bedsheet, so anonymous in its perpetual floating, is undoubtedly Kim’s eye to those who know her; still, it becomes your mother’s eye in snowy evenings. It becomes your girlfriend’s when you last kissed her soft cheeks. It becomes your classmate, being left out from the volleyball team decades ago.
Conversation 2 © Wonjun Jeong
The specific power of a photograph, inherent both to our ability to empathize and our need for spirituality, is that of maintaining specificity in terms of space and time while assuring to each observer the continuity of time. Though humans evolve and technology advances, our essence remains unvaried and can be mirrored by any pair of eyes. Our current reality, for how complex and complete in itself, carries within its arms another dimension. It carries both the consequences of past times and the potential evolution of molecules. And photography, perhaps, captures precisely that: another world but in this one.
