unguided tour

The cliché: in Manhattan, metropolis of change, memory is a foreigner. “NY. NY. Deny. Deny. History does not return there,” writes Hélène Cixous in Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory. (more…)

On June 20, 2009 Neda Agha-Soltan, a student at Teheran’s Islamic Azad University is shot by Iranian police on her way to join an antigovernment protest march. She is 26 years old. Someone films her dying on the street, and immediately uploads the video on Youtube making Neda Agha-Soltan the symbol of the student protests and a martyr for democratic reform in Iran. (more…)

The primal screen is a Christian fantasma.
I must be careful not to impose it onto cultures which have incorporated their own religious beliefs, and which have developed ideas of the nature of woman as well as the function of visual images different from mine. (more…)

Can you feel the aggression?
I don’t feel aggression. I feel envy.

When I shoot a photograph, I interrupt the continuity of visual experience. When I shoot at a photograph (or a mirror), I interrupt the illusion of depth. If you don’t believe me, take a look at André Kertész’s Broken Plate. (more…)

How did the primal screen enter art history?

Let’s assume I was an expert.

Among Baroque painters Johannes Vermeer is the undisputed master of the primal screen. His paintings are famous for creating a semblance of seamlessness, an impression of inviolable privacy. In his painting Vermeer banishes the notion of rupture, forbids the intrusion of an unwanted reality. What I admire most in Vermeer’s art is its evocation of the hymen, intact. (more…)

How does one fabricate the primal screen?
Let’s assume I was an apprentice.

Florence. While Piero della Francesca was working at the Madonna, Leon Battista Alberti introduced a new technology for viewing and representing the visible world, known as linear perspective. To achieve the projection of three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional plane Alberti devised a viewing grid — “a thin veil, finely woven” — he called “Velum”, Latin for hymen. Perspectival images are produced with the hymen in mind. (more…)

Where does Veruschka come from?
Let’s assume the things I see  are for real.

From the French Riviera to a small village in Tuscany.

In the tiny museum of Monterchi there is a marvelous fresco of the Madonna del Parto (the Virgin of Parturition) that bears a striking resemblance to Veruschka. The fresco was created by Piero della Francesca in the second half of the fifteenth century for the medieval chapel opposite the museum. (more…)

Where do images come from?

Let’s assume the words I use are my own.

A revelation: Veruschka at the window. Underneath a black leather coat, loosely girded above the navel, her pale, silky skin is glowing from within, in stark contrast to the darkness surrounding her. Her face is blank.  She looks at me but does she see me? (more…)

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.“ (John Berger, Ways of Seeing) Why, then, “is it so hard for us to believe that our truths are often fantasies?” (Amy Bloom, Normal) Perhaps because we have learned to believe in the Truth of science. (more…)

“I must therefore submit to this law: I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph. I can only sweep it with my glance, like a smooth surface. The Photograph is flat, platitudinous in the true sense of the word, that is what I must acknowledge. It is a mistake to associate Photography … with the notion of a dark passage (camera obscura). It is a camera lucida that we should say, … for the essence of the image is to be altogether outside, without intimacy.” (Roland Barthes) (more…)

Memory is performative. To remember is to repeat.
Not every memory gets performed and repeated. Some memories are so horrific that we censor their re-presentation. Perpetrator memories of the Holocaust as sexual extravaganza belong to this category.

Liliana Cavani’s controversial 1974 movie The Night Porter has been labeled “Nazi chic” (Roger Ebert). For some critics the film is a shamelessly pornographic fantasy of the Holocaust, a “sentimental idyll … exalting romantic love between victim and victimizer, against the brute reality of Nazi violence,” (Marga Cottino-Jones) using the Holocaust as a mere “backdrop to the erotic/sadomasochistic misadventures of Max and Lucia, Nazi and victim” (Rebecca Scherr); a “despicable attempt to titillate [the viewer] by exploiting memories of persecution and suffering.” (Ebert)
I’m not convinced.

(more…)