A COMET, A HANGING POSTPONED, ARCADIA AND WONDER by Craigie Horsfield (1997) Looking down, the world without horizon or perspective becomes pattern and color. It takes time to reorientate and interpret the single plane of the ground. In painting this looking down bas been a relatively unusual device. Views from above are usually situated with some foreground detail to locate them, as though having the viewpoint of a hillside or, occasionally, a high building. Although there are novelties, the picture made as though from the imagined view of a bird was not more than an anecdote. With the invention of photography in the nineteenth century, added to these bird's-eye paintings was the curiosity of pictures made from balloons floating above the city. However, the rhetoric of these novelties was not developed until the early part of the twentieth century, when it became briefly part of a larger and radical program. The view from above, with its pattern making of ordinary things, its new associations with the tall buildings of the modern metropolis, with airplanes and the machinery of the camera, offered novelty as possibility. It became part of the language of the constructivists, of surrealism and of the new objectivity. The old world was made new and strange, allowing the astonished audience to interrogate this now unfamiliar place. In the disruption of the commonplace world was the promise of escape from its familiar tyrannies. Dissemination through the reproduction of photographs to the audience of the masses was part of the possibility of a radical program. The audience, given new seeing - of which such devices were an essential part - would recognize the world for what it was, with all its inequalities and cruelties, no longer as the fiefdom of those who held power. The old order would be overthrown. This was the radical promise of aesthetic programs allied to a politics of progress. The almost antlike figures on city streets or beneath the radio mast, in the landscape of the modern world, caught in narratives of incident without consequence, were to be the unknowing actors in the transformation of that world. Inevitably, the novelty of form faded, as it must, leaving only mannerism, an amusing trick, or a conversation piece. What small radical intent may have been attached to it was swallowed in the onrush of progress. Until now, when it is associated with aerial photography and mapmaking and a perspective distant enough to be without human incident, a view banal and ubiquitous, interminable. The photographs of Gerco de Ruijter made from the air are without horizon. However, unlike aerial photographs, the edge appears to act as a limit and not firstly as demarcation. The edge of the aerial photograph may be determined by practical concerns of the capability of the lens, the organization of a grid and, primarily, matters of scale. The actual edge we suppose to be a technical disruption between one sheet and the next. Here in the work of Gerco de Ruijter, the edge is not a border with an elsewhere. To some extent it is apart of the containment of the appearance of a hermetic world. Seen from above there is the, now familiar, disorientation followed by an only partial recognition. The busy landscape of Holland, roads and the buildings of towns, villages and farms, powerlines and railways have disappeared. The edge of the camera's frame excludes them, leaving the spaces between. The world within the edge is at first hermetic and beautiful. Isolated, it is the world of a rural idyll and because we suppose that the world continues beyond the edge of the frame, it opens the disquieting possibility of its being without limit. It is as though there is discovered an extraordinary and imaginary place within the everyday and commonplace. The intervention of man is reduced to small incident. It is an almost magical land of containment and possibility, caught between discovery and dream. The worlds of the pictures are without continuity or consequence; closed worlds become perfect in their stillness and isolation. At once present and impossible, in them is discovered a place recognizable and disquieting, this is the Arcadia of a green world thought lost. Our access to it is revealed in the mediation of the camera. A camera hung beneath a kite, a contraption that manages to be simultaneously poetic and banal. Once again, the camera is recuperated as the fantastical machine of revelation. In its mediation it is confirmed as apart of our wonder. The camera's presence is constantly reiterated, but through familiarity it slides towards invisibility. Quite as remarkable as the claim on our recognition of photographs made from space rockets or within the veins of the human body is our wonder at their making, at the extraordinarily intricate mechanism of the camera. The worlds revealed are separated from us. Beautiful and shining, continents and seas, mountains and river deltas, these worlds are complete; large and small, the small made large and the large, small. In the veins of a leaf or the streams of a great river wonder floats free of pain. As the camera glides through the body or is engineered to look as though with the eye of an insect, it is invested with the innocent longing of the modern world stripped of confusion. Flattened and textured, read as pattern and color, the pictures resemble nothing so much as the forms of painting. This is the "likeness" of the pictures, their metaphorical rhetoric. Against these patterns we can discern more slowly the small incidents of recognition in the punctuation of a road, traces of human activity, tracks of cattle, corn tied after harvesting, the geometrical cutting of drainage channels, water courses and the regimented plantations of young trees in precise lines. Water, land and trees are the recurrent elements: trees in leaf as larger masses of colour or casting narrow shadows across the land, the land that also changes with the seasons. His intimate and pastoral, the industry of the small figures, the seasons that mark the landscape. In winter the water itself is frozen and riven by great cracks across its surface. Only the sky is missing, the sky in which the camera hangs. It exists but in the reflection of clouds on the water, the light of day sliding across the land, as form is described by shadow. The longing of this place, the inherited dream of the land, is of loss. The astonishment is at a world present but unseen. Here is an Arcadia without hills or mountains, inhabited by mythical creatures, a swan flying low across flatland, cattle at pasture and shadows. A real world become unreal. Photographs, so often the material of separation, repeatedly return to this: the lost place, the world to dream into. Today, there are numerous monographs of the work of photographers, historical and contemporary. There are many illustrated catalogues and picture books. The history of photography is traced through the biographies of its central figures or in the rediscovery of the work of photographers passed by. Occasionally, there are publications of "anonymous" photographs, the debris of the millions upon millions of family snaps, of momentoes and keepsakes, made and discarded in this century. It is a history as activity and exhaustion, and its limit, its containment, is as indistinct as it is certain. It isn't simply that histories of photography are sequences of elision, narratives of continuity that draw together disparate materials into a semblance of structure, for which the things in themselves, the photographs, are taken to be sufficient justification. But that the development of photography is seen as having been driven by invention and technological advance, so that its form is simply a succession of tropes and mannerisms without social context or consequence and without purpose or intention beyond their containment. Photography is closed in the mechanism of its separation. By the start of the century it was principally the medium of document and record. Its practice was the production of the material of category, type and order. In the containment of its function and mechanism it was at once the document of the world and its separation from it. Photography became the practice of accounting an elsewhere, not even absence but, more exactly, what had not become. The picture was the record of information, to be read and looked through, while the photograph, the thing in itself, was present only as an interruption, the condition of transmission. The photograph, this thing of paper and emulsion, stubbornly reverts to the material fact: the paper yellowing, edges becoming dog-eared through use and the image itself fading. In entropy, becoming present, it finds place only as it is broken. The stillness of photographs is the stillness of death, where meaning is always elsewhere and the surface, the fact of the thing, is invisible. The photograph is without place in the separation of its meaning. Having no place it is denied relation, denied its possible becoming. The photograph may exist in the present as part of relation but in separation is always in the past. This is the delayed parturition of the photograph, birth forever postponed, never becoming. Its immanence denied in the culture in which it was conceived. Most photographs distributed in this century have been reproduced in magazines as a means of document, report or propaganda. For seventy years, from the start of the century, there grew and flourished a vast number of magazines and journals of photographs. They have in greater part defined the condition of photography. News, fashion, and travel magazines have formed the description of the world beyond our experience. Alongside these, are the "technical" magazines that developed, as information but also as advertising, to inform amateurs and professional photographers alike of new materials and methods. At first these were illustrated with exemplary pictures, later by "portfolios," to inspire the readers or to confirm their expectations. The description of photography has been largely technical. At the height of the American photographic aesthetic of the fifties, elaborate accounts of exposure, technique and printing methods were given even greater consideration than the generalized notions of beauty and harmony. To this day, most questions put to photographers concern technique. As did many others, I learnt about photographs from magazines, from thousands and thousands of pictures in libraries and storerooms, taken from dusty boxes and high shelves, stored in files or tied together with string. Stack after stack of magazines were leafed through until each page was almost without differentiation. Hands dry with the dust of aging paper, I would glance quickly and only occasionally stop at a page, for a photograph that was graphically distinct or out of place, diverting or stupid. Often it described something interesting or amusing but the photograph itself would be redundant. I never returned to them. Almost always, I would be disappointed and even feel cheated, manipulated by some simple device. I stopped for portraits and for nudes. It is difficult sometimes when surrounded by images of naked people to recognize how closely the tolerance of public taste is traced through photographs. It is not enough to understand it simply as voyeurism; it is a complicated place in which relation shifts in a curious dance. Most of these pictures of course remain closed in their manneristic devices, in their weak expectations, whether coy or blatant, the conventions of their making allow no possible meaning beyond the banality of their genre. Sometimes though there was a break: a glance, a gesture, a sense of gravity, where the relation itself, with its burden of longing and fear, vanity and indifference, fascination and disquiet - always greater and almost always other than the impoverished story of the picture - was traced. But most pictures, whatever the subject, when examined are emptied. Most are futile. Usually, I would stop at a picture in the vain hope of learning what not to do. Almost never at a picture for its accomplishment, but for some disruption. Any pause became disturbing, an interruption and a delay when there were so many pages more. But there was something else. When looking at the photograph of a place, there would rarely be anything in its form to distinguish it from a thousand others, and yet I had stopped to imagine how it would be there in the place it seemed to show. What it would be like to walk there. Simply curiosity and fantasy. Having offered its momentary distraction, the picture was closed, without place in the present. Sometimes in a reverie that had drifted far beyond the page, there would be a sense of astonishment and a longing for the quiet of a green world. Sometimes, only sometimes, the picture would take place even on the page so that I would run my hand over it and close my eyes. In the winter of 1977,I worked in the darkroom of the House of Culture in the Krowodiza district of Krakéw. The rooms, in one of the wings of the building were small with low ceilings; one leading into the next, the last being little more than a cabinet used for loading film. There were narrow tables set along the walls of the outer rooms, in the first of which were stored the materials for developing and in the second of which stood three enlargers. They protruded into the passage between the tables and under them were piles of photo magazines from Hungary and Czechoslovakia, from Yugoslavia and Poland. Some were printed on smooth, glossy paper but most on the coarse heavy paper that smells of damp wood. On top of the magazines were piled boxes of chemicals, and others of bulbs and lenses and film holders and every sundry item of photographic equipment so that there was no place for any thing more. It smelled of the magazines and of chemicals, of heated metal and burnt dust. It smelled of darkrooms everywhere. Even with the doors open and the light on it is the same. As I get older, that smell mixing with the smell of apartment blocks, of boiling cabbage and cleaning spirit triggers a feeling of despair. Stefan Marczynski, the photographer for the House of Culture, worked part time, and although he was the only other person to use the darkroom we rarely spoke. He regarded me with suspicion, and on the rare occasion he needed to tell me something his manner was at once proprietorial and obsequious, as though unsure as to whether I might pose some unspecified threat. After a time his attitude changed and he began to be less careful. He used the darkroom to make business, printing private work and dealing in materials, and I suppose that at first he had feared that I had been sent to spy on him. In a curious way he now seemed almost disappointed, even irritated, as though he were not thought worthy of attention. His sullen embarrassment was replaced by a dismissive shrug. He no longer put the telephone down when l came in and made less and less of an attempt to hide the boxes he brought in and out. I learnt that he was newly married. The responsibility of his situation seemed to weigh ever more heavily on him, the work at the House of Culture itself was apart of his new life. Most of the time when he was there, silence filled the darkroom, but occasionally it was broken by sudden panic and a flurry of activity usually following a hushed and nervous telephone call. After a while, he only appeared to collect paper, film, chemicals or to leave a new package. His time was spent in a complex structure of deals and combinations put together to obtain a new lens or a film spool. Sometimes there were small triumphs. Some piece of Western equipment bartered for, announced in a peremptory telephone message that would summon him to a small town outside the city, where mysteriously a new consignment had appeared. Before word could get around, he would rush out in a frenzy of anticipation. The most prized object in the darkroom was a device for dissolving chemicals, a metal plate that vibrated to encourage the powdered developer to break down in a beaker of water without stirring. It seemed an interminable process. The stubborn powders remained hard and granular until he or I, finally losing patience, would crush and chase the remaining grains around the bottom of the vessel with a spoon. The machine was East German, and the small pride he had in it had little to do with its efficiency, it was rather a matter of satisfaction at having found it and a small sense of wonder that such a machine should even exist. The true finds he hoarded at his home. They were almost always Western, their value determined by curious laws of rumour and reputation. Beside their technical sophistication, the ingenuity of the chemical mixer seemed insignificant. He was taken up in the skirmishes he fought each day, with their defeats and small victories, and a longing for unattainable machines he had read about or heard of. Machines that would do unimaginable things in an impossible world. The reason for his coming to the darkroom less frequently was soon explained. He had found more work elsewhere but needed to give the impression that nothing had changed. He was being watched by the deputy director, a small fierce man, a poet of local renown whose amusement appeared to be in tormenting the photographer. The only person who seemed to notice his existence, the poet would come to the darkroom unexpectedly, always with a new demand and an impossible timetable. The photographer, feigning indifference, would agree to do it as a favour, if he had time, when he could. His manner was offhand, almost dismissive and yet he was in constant terror of losing his work, of losing the darkroom. After his tormentor had left, he would shake with anger. The demands of the poet became more and more preposterous over time but the ritual was always the same. There was no end to it; they depended on each other in their mutual disregard. The House of Culture had been built through the will and determination of Anna Chrobak-Kaputa. During the war she had fled with her family across Poland to Kraków, in a childhood of chaos and upheaval. She had grown in the renaissance of the late fifties, full of hope. Her daughter was born when she was seventeen. She must always have been rebellious and was always filled with delight of astonishment at the new thing, always full of their possibility until you were intoxicated, like her, with enthusiasm. The House of Culture worked, where most others fell into conformity and a dreary filling out of quotas. Within its orbit was an extraordinarily active dream of a socialist culture, no matter that it was surrounded by mendacity and bad faith. Perhaps because of this, because she was a believer where others had long since lost their faith, or had never believed, she was regarded as dangerous and difficult. She was almost childlike in her faith; stubborn and infuriating, she fought passionately for her cause. She fought for every stone of the building, a once ruinous small country manor now surrounded by new settlements. Year by year she defended it. In a good year it grew: a recording studio, a small library, a film theatre, and in one wonderful season a small area of parkland and a stage for open-air concerts. People came from the tall blocks of the district, and even the bourgeoisie from the city, who condescended to her and despised the place, brought their children each week. But in bad times or in good there were the constant attacks of elitism or populism, profligacy or meanness. Each day would bring a new delivery of poison in anonymous letters or calls from the district council. Sometimes she would find supporters in Warsaw, far enough away not to feel threatened by her. She was painfully honest. She would not sell the buildings; she would not move away. Her marriage fell apart, and she went to live in a small apartment that had served as a storeroom at the House of Culture. I left Poland in the upheavals of 1980. The pressure on Anna became greater to compromise, or dissemble. Marczynski, the photographer, became leader of the Solidarity faction at the House. They planned to hang Anna from its gates. Each day was filled with small cruelties, yet the place remained, as she clung tenaciously to the idea that culture was guaranteed in the action of individuals and in their relation, in their recognition one of another, and that it mattered as life itself matters. She was tired and distant and vulnerable. Her enthusiasm dulled, only appearing briefly when she was away from the place she had loved. She died in her room alone. When I travel past, beyond the rivulet of the drainage channel the buildings of the House of Culture are now those of a motel; its gates overhung by an already defunct neon sign urging the hurrying passerby to make the detour. Wonder and small cruelties. It was not the future for which she had built but the present. To look on this landscape is to look at the place of men and women living between the everyday and catastrophe. Who saw in each new claim of progress, each spectacular invention, a small justification; the possibility of life. The stones of these two people, no more than memoir homily, are here because their history, the description of wonder and the machinery of the world are not separate. Dreams of a world transformed in which we are no longer thrown hither and thither by forces beyond our comprehension are common, perhaps, to all of us. The condition of the world, the matter of the photograph, was born and carried by the people whose lives exist within us. The societies of the twentieth century were driven by the myths of progress. Their remnants are left today in small towns and run-down districts, a newsboard, a display case on a street cornet, information sheets with faded pictures of space exploration or of far away lands. Whatever the motive: the glory of the system or the infinite promise, what remained was the wonder of human achievement and the longing of the lost world that yet existed. Wonder and longing do not live in separation from the world. Cruelty and hurt are not without place. The machines that carry our hope and those that destroy us have as their engine the will and purposes of our fellows and of ourselves. The things that photographs show whether terrible or joyful, commonplace or fantastic are within the world and are only understood on this ground of limit and consequence. I have been writing this in an attic beneath a broad window above which are only the chimneys and the sky. This past winter bas been dry, the driest winter, it is said, for many years. There is talk of drought, the television news shows empty reservoirs and warns of water shortage even if the ram comes now. The skies are dear and unclouded night after night. When the wind is strong, blowing the dust of the city away, the stars and constellations are extraordinarily vivid, bright and dear. The comet, the brightest thing in the bright sky, slides further to the north almost disappearing from my sight at the edge of the window before I sleep, its plume a trace across the rectangle of glass. Each evening since it appeared my wife goes out of the house and crosses the road to the open land. My son and I teased her about it at first and she no longer tells us that she is going, but when I look out I see her standing alone beyond the trees, a long way off, her face pale in the darkness, gazing intently up. CRAIGIE HORSFIELD top