Blurs of the Natural
When faced with the real, Toni Hafkenscheid blurs the edges - as we all do, in the end. In this, his images not only represent their vistas, they also represent the imaginative possibilities for alternate perspectives... a multiplicity of visions that exist only in the blur of experience itself. Nature waits, not to be discovered but to be encountered, and in the encounter we manufacture our own perspectives on the questions - whether we focus on the image or the fantasy or the reality makes little difference - the details are in the blur...
The French film theorist Andre Bazin insisted that photography "embalms time," like a death-mask for the eternally preserved moment. 2 Bazin's analogy was to the gold-plated Egyptian sarcophagus, the guardian for the mummified flesh statues of spiritual perpetuity. Flesh turned into a model of itself; a model of times past and a full-scale effigy that allows us to imagine the perpetuation of memory. Yet mummification is not the only preservation tactic; gold is only one side of the alchemical divide, and statuary only one way to imagine. Consider another such story of gold: the Gold Rush of the Canadian North, and the permafrost fantasy of cryogenic preservation - coupled not, in this instance, with monumental burial chambers of pyramid stone but instead with the dancing coloured lights of an ephemeral night time sky. Here, natural fireworks pierce the darkness of invisible night, and the result is larger than life. And this story too relates to photography - for the dancing of lights has always been that upon which the image is modeled - not with the entirety of the night at its disposal, but with something poignantly similar: the liminal presence of perpetually fleeting moments that, without photography, would never exit from the blur of time itself. There is a difference however, and it is that photography's debt is not to gold but to silver - that alchemical ingredient which allowed the history of recorded images to begin. The dancing lights of the image world are, strangely, drawn to preservation within this black box of silver possibilities - the camera is a capture device for the embalming not only of time, but of light as well.
Now, it may have been Susan Sontag who called the camera a "predatory weapon," 3 and Vilem Flusser who suggested that the photographer is a hunter, stalking the "wildlife" of the visible world. 4 But what Sontag never addressed, and what Flusser would never admit, is that this predator sees most effectively with peripheral vision. It is in the periphery of the gaze that one sees movement and motion, though the details themselves may be blurred. It is, in other words, in the peripheries - in the blur - that the context for the image inevitably lies. In this sense, to "embalm time" is to literally embalm this blur itself - to preserve the moment not only for its literal presentation, but for its temporal and illuminated and imaginary specificities as well.
But aren't these specificities precisely why the work of Toni Hafkenscheid can speak both so poignantly and with such familiarity to a world we know but have never seen? The world we know is larger than life - so large, in fact, that our personal perspectives can never be adequately represented. Blurred at the edges, these images are more faithful to the realities we know than to those that exist right before our eyes: more photographic than the photograph itself. These are images that also tell stories; images implicated in the act of their documentation; images which have been embalmed not only for their timing and light, but for their contexts too. In other words, Hafkenscheid has mobilized a process that amplifies the possibilities of the original. These are not mere scenes uninhabited by the human gaze (and therefore - according to the tropes of photographic logic objective or universal). Instead, these are isolated moments that open themselves up to imaginary inhabitants - ourselves. These moments are habitats for the imagination itself. |
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