Just as painters from the 16th century onward (Titian, Rembrandt, Fragonard, Turner, Cézanne, and de Kooning, to name a few) began to foreground their medium and make it almost as much a subject of their pictures as what the painting nominally represented, photographers, over the course of the last 50 years [—] have been doing the same.
Reading this in an article by Peter Plagens in Art in America (Feb. 09) about the Met's exhibition Reality Check: Truth and Illusion in Contemporary Photography, made me think immediately of things said last night by Nathaniel Dorsky about his films screened at SFMoMA.
Still from Sarabande, 2008, 16mm, silent, 15 min.
Dorsky creates gem-like short, silent films of collaged takes of iridescent flickerings, shadows, and light. In his films, he says, the screen is a leading character. He emphasizes his preferred stock—16mm Kodachrome, and specifically its lower register of color. He says he's not interested in still photography—even if many of his sequences would be stunning still photos. He likens his work with film to painting.
He is dogmatic about his approach—in the old sense of the word dogma, a symbol of truth. His assertion seems to bristle people in the audience, but it is a positive affirmation of himself, the truth of himself. That he stands behind himself and the unique output that is a result of his own eye, hand, effort must seem an affront to those less self-contained... I don't know. It only bothers me when he suggests to do otherwise is to make rot. I think the word he used was poison. One man's poison is another man's drink. And as for the rest of us...
also from Sarabande
The photos in the Met's show are concerned with another truth. The exhibit tracks the evaporation of the belief in photography's ability to represent reality through the work of 17 photographers who mess with our assumptions. At issue here is Is it real?
This is from Hilter Moves East (1975, Gelatin silver print) by David Levinthal. These are little toy Nazis, but the effect is real. We know the long-standing discontent about Robert Capa's photo of the soldier shot in the Spanish Civil War. This step further into verisimilitude turns the question upside down.
Dorsky says he isn't a great thinker. His films don't come from ideas; are not about film as an idea, but film as an experience.
The rule was that photographs possess enough veracity to, upon occasion, help find people criminally guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and send them to prison. The 'truth' that a photograph represents (i.e., re-presents, presents again), its direct physical relationship to something that actually existed, can still make me weak in the knees. I tear up at certain 19th century photographs. My god, I think, those people picnicking at that lake, looking like living, breathing souls, walked the earth a century and a half ago. And then, today, there are photographs of ice on Mars, I get breathless looking at them.—Peter Plagens
Weak at the knees, breathless, that's the experience of watching a Dorsky film. What surprises me is that no one in the crowd gasps out loud, no one sighs in wonder. It may be a cultural thing, but here in a packed theater in California, everyone participates in the silence that holds the light. For 20 some minutes everyone interacts with the screen, taking in its truth, glorying in its veracity.
Dorsky's films are saving grace. See them when you can.
Levinthal photo courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Stills from Sarabande courtesy of The Auteurs recent interview with Dorsky and from Film Society of Lincoln Center.
