In a village in Rethymnon, Crete, around 1945, a family's life is disrupted when the husband leaves, never to return. His mother, who considers her daughter-in-law's family responsible, on a photo she owns pierces her son's mother-in-law's eyes. About the same time, on the island of Paros, another woman, for unknown reasons, pierces her own eyes on one of her photographs. Possibly numerous similar instances exist which are, however, very difficult to record, since pictures like these, used for black magic, are kept well-hidden in carefully folded envelopes or weathered old wallets, and are only discovered by chance.
These acts of symbolic blinding, for revenge or for protection from the "evil eye", express a primitive fear of the catastrophic power of a stare, a fear that has produced myths and maintained superstitions for centuries. In Greek mythology, for instance, Orpheus, breaking Persephone's law, turns to look at Euridice on her way from death to life and loses her forever; Medusa could turn her enemies into stone as soon as they set eyes on her; anyone who set eyes on Artemis and her companions bathing was severely punished. In everyday life, the stare recognizes, seeks, aggravates, warns, but also destroys. What sustains this power of the stare in photography? How is it possible, through the creases of the photographic paper, through a yellowed and faded image, for the threatening stare of the photographed person to surface triumphant and omnipotent years later?
In photography, nothing stands between the photographed and the viewer -no material, no representation, no illusion. The photographed is conveyed intact to the viewer as the energy of light. Roland Barthes describes this exquisitely in La Chambre Claire, referring to a picture of his mother: "From a real, physical object that was there emanate rays that touch me here, now. The time lapse between these two acts is insubstantial. The image of the lost person comes and touches me like a star's rays. Something like an umbilical cord connects the photographed person with my eyes. The light, though intangible, is a medium in flesh, an epidermis that I share with the person in the photograph."(1)
The magical power attributed to the stare of the photographed person seems to have more to do with this particular sense of time emanating from the photograph: it is the "then" (the time the photograph was taken) that we experience and comprehend during the "now" (the time of looking at the photograph). This consciousness does not depend at all on the quality of the photographic image, on its clarity, or on its faithful rendering of details and colors.
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Pericles Striligas
Eleni Christodoulaki's Collection |
The examples above were coincidentally discovered when Eleni Christodoulaki was researching 30 original negatives on paper by street photographer Pericles Striligas. These photographs, taken in the 1950s, consist of collective portraits, apparently for mass production of identification card (ID) photographs. What distinguishes these photographs is the contradiction between the "collective" and the "personal." Collective or group photographs call for participation and the expression of the relationship connecting the persons involved, whereas an identification card photograph requires physical isolation and a more or less blank stare focusing on the lens. The persons in Pericles Strigilas's photographs are with each other but also alone. They stand, in front of the lens, as members of a family, group, or society, but at the same time as individuals cut off from their environment and personal relations. A sense of awkwardness, an imperceptible fear, a look of expectation, are the sole indications of life in these people who are undergoing the trial of the photographic act, to be completed shortly thereafter by their symbolic decapitation on the identification card photos.
Pericles Striligas, according to Eleni Christodoulaki (2), was a street photographer who roamed, neighborhoods and villages taking instant photographs. Like many of his colleagues in Crete, Strigilas also sold talismans, an act possibly originating from the "evil-eye" superstition. Together with the photograph, one could purchase a talisman for protection against future viewers of one's photographed face.
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Stefanos Paschos
"Portraits ÉÉ, 1997 |
The photographed stare resists the decay of the photographic material, as it resists scenographic interventions or a models' rehearsed poses. This superiority of the photographed person's consciousness constitutes the essence of Stephanos Paschos' work in Portraits II (1997) and Narcissus avant Millenium. (1999). The young people's faces he photographs are transferred successively to photo-sensitized media such as fabric, plaster, or wood. The fading of the photographic material through these repeated transfers, the scenographic positioning of the portraits on processed canvases, as well as the models' posture, bring to mind the Egyptian Faiyum Portraits. Just as the Faiyum images, as symbols of life, resist the deterioration of the body, the photographed body resists the natural decay of the photographic material. It crosses time barriers, religion and traditions, creates myths, provokes hypotheses, always appears at its peak and is as contemporary as the stare addressed to it.
Photographing is often connected with the need for photographic perpetuation, that is, someone's desire to become immortal. Paradoxically, this desire is fulfilled through an image in which the photographed person, lying lifeless and motionless on the surface of the photographic material, already looks dead. Something that reinforces this resemblance is that in post-mortem portraits, depending on the photographer's interventions, the faces appear alive. Evgenia Aravantinou pursues this look with her photographs. In the chilling dark and silent atmosphere of a morgue, the suspicion of sleep makes the view bearable and, at the same time, legitimizes the viewer's stare.
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Evgenia Aravantinou
Untitled, 1999 |
"Someone to look at me" is what the person to be photographed essentially expects. Turning their eyes to the lens, people posing anticipate a glance to be cast on them. They submit their stares, expecting another gaze to pierce the surface of the paper, and following the opposite direction, meet their own stare. In most cases, the viewer has the same desire: a stare turned to him or her, someone to look at, and someone to look back. The time lapse between the two stares is overcome by the power of this desire. The present time is reinstated and the "present" of the photograph, which is the time of its viewing, creates the illusion of real eye contact. This illusion is more widespread and accepted today than ever before. Electronic media, telecommunications, Internet, and mass media have familiarized the viewer with the concept of virtual: distance and time have lost their natural properties, creating different notions of communication and real life.
The photographer's intervention between these two stares acts as a catalyst. Behind his camera, he directs the meeting place of the two stares, creates the condition for their interaction. His intervention is sometimes invisible; he as creator of the photographic image, discreetly withdraws to allow the photographed person's stare to bypass him. The photographic image then becomes the ideal meeting place for stares, for gazes.
This condition is fulfilled in the Portraits (1994-96) of Yiannis Marapas. The persons he photographs appear to stand in front of a mirror in which the viewer takes the place of the reflected image.
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Yiannis Marapas
"Portraits", 1994-96 |
In Nikos Papadopoulos' work Triptychs (1996) the typology of the photographs connotes the genre of icons. The central image in each triptych refers to the icon of the Virgin Mary, and the mother's portraits to the right and to the left give the viewer a sense of a short time period: as long as it takes the eyelids to cover the eyes: two psychological conditions that may mean a beginning and an end, an affirmation and a negation, two moments in time that alternate, giving life to the photographed.
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Nikos Papadopoulos
"Triptychs", 1996 |
In other instances the photographer, imposes a certain role on the individuals he photographs. As a model, the person being photographed is simultaneously himself or herself but also the "role" he or she assumes. In Dimitris Yeros' photographs, the model is transformed into a luminous body¯smooth complexion, nonchalant, and impertinent. At the instant of photographing, the stare divides. Seeking approval for his pose, the model remains looking at the photographer, while the assumed persona gazes to the viewer.
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Dimitris Yeros
"Theory of the Nude", 1988-97 |
The direction in Stratos Kalafatis' photographs is different. Initially, his photographs appear to possess all the stereotypical characteristics of an amateur shot. The body language of those photographed¯their expressions, their stares¯ betray their naive desire to be photographed at this particular beach on this particular summer day. Little do they know about their imminent photographic metamorphosis. The light from the flash directed at them eliminates the shadows from their bodies, while the unorthodox processing of the photographic materials alters significantly the hues of the sea and the sky. Stratos Kalafatis transposes to these persons the atmosphere of a solar eclipse and imbibes them with the threatening feel of this natural phenomenon.
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Stratos Kalafatis
Untitled, 1999 |
In the series Wearing a Leather Jacket, Phillipe Delacroix conveys a younger age to the persons he photographs; he attributes to them a different lifestyle. A leather jacket he offers the elderly people he meets in the street is enough to achieve that. This momentary disguise gives everyone an unexpected role, and is received with great enthusiasm. The persons photographed challenge the viewer to look at them and decode the riddle of their appearance: are they old people who refuse to age or young people who grew old in their jackets? Before shooting, Phillipe Delacroix takes a Polaroid image of each person and shows them how they look in his photographs. Many photographers use this approach to gain their model's trust, explain their intent, and warn them of their photographic transformation. "To photograph people," observes Susan Sontag, "is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can symbolically possessed" (3).
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Philippe Delacroix
"Il Portait un Blouson Noir" |
With one eye shut, Haris Diamantidis photographs the photographers photographing. He photographs them focusing on individuals, events, gestures, or places. Photographers collect what their sight touches, and simultaneously they themselves become collected objects in Haris Diamantidis' collection. The topic of this work is not so much photographers during action, but rather the photographic action itself. Haris Diamantidis shows us what we never see in photographs but what happens extraneously to a photographic image, the place surrounding a photographic shot, and eventually, the circumstances of a photograph.
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Haris Diamantidis
"With one eye shut" |
(1) Roland Barthes, La Chambre Claire, pp. 126-127, ed. Le Seuil, 1980
(2) From an unpublished research of Eleni Christodoulaki (1998)
(3) Susan Sontag, On Photography, óåë. 14, Penguin Books (1979)
