Under by a specific angle, light or moment, photographs sometimes cease partially or even entirely to depict a subject that the eye can grasp, giving way to a formal weightlessness. There is no longer any meaning for the viewer to seize…
To the question “What is it?” answers the impossibility of discrimining. It could be anything, it is first nothing. But after the initial shock, the order of things reverses. The abstraction begins to act as a massive opening within representation which leads the viewer toward an infinity of possibilities. The power of the formless takes hold of him. In the absence of receive and perceive, he must and can construct his own representation by drawing from within himself.
Isn’t this photography’s most extreme offering given that it erases the primacy of figuration? But isn’t it also the most challenging for both viewer and creator? Because the viewer is no longer guided through a narrative and no familiar reference point is given to him. Because reality offers to the creator just a few subjects that lend themselves to the deconstruction of representation and the approach runs counter to photography’s fundamental purpose. Finally because the gaping void of “nothingness”foreshadowing the chaos from which we came and to which we shall return, provokes a sense of vertigo and repulsion making it difficult to approach let alone master.
Yet, doesn’t this offer also present an opportunity for personal discovery, for rethinking things, perhaps even for rebirth and thus for emotions and hope in the face of a creeping confinement of thought or being and a despair that threatens to destroy? It is no longer a matter of the viewer following a fissure in the representation to slip behind the mirror. It is a matter of reaching one’s true self through a *tabula rasa* unsettling at first yet ultimately revitalizing. It is a deep breath. It is freedom.
But isn’t freedom the most difficult of all?
See-
