Known and Strange Things Read online

  Kieślowski explores the experiences of two people who live in the same city, visit the same places, touch the same doorknobs. Does their proximity have any meaning? Will they meet? He also looks at episodes from Joseph’s life that are curiously reiterated in Auguste’s: both drop a book, and it opens to a crucial page; both abandon their dogs. Kieślowski suggests that two separate lives can be enigmatically linked, displaced only in time. The search for one’s double is like a bird’s when looking for a branch. Color forms another set of links in the film: red streetlights, billboards, furniture, clothing seem interconnected in the same gentle and elusive way that the characters are. They create an alternative map of the city.

  Kieślowski, who grew up under Communist rule, in Poland, was unembarrassed by big questions. What is the role of religion in modern life? Why does love so often force people into comical situations? Red was his last film, the final installment of a trilogy on which he worked with premonitory fervor before he died, at the age of fifty-four. Blue, a film about the confusions particular to grief, was followed by the picaresque romance White. Finally came Red, glowing and humane. At the end, two principal characters from each of the three films are brought together by chance on a sinking ferry, as though this were the fate they were being drawn toward all along.

  I learned from Kieślowski how unforeseen encounters can subtly pile up and determine the course of a person’s life. In any narrative, there is the material that moves the story forward. But the storyteller also includes objects or events that hint at a pattern of signification swirling above the surface, part of the story’s logic but just out of reach.

  In my novel Open City, as the narrator waits for an older friend at a restaurant, he watches the news on a TV with the volume muted. There’s bad weather in the English Channel, and a ferry has capsized. Heavy rain is forecast for all of Europe. The bad weather, the sinking ferry, and the oneiric mood of this passage are an homage to Red. It wasn’t until after the novel was published that I discovered I shared a birthday with Kieślowski. The bird had found its branch.

  John Berger

  IN THE SPRING of 2008, while sketching at the National Gallery in London, John Berger rested his satchel on an empty chair. A security guard approached Berger and asked him to remove it. Berger placed the bag between his feet, but the guard was not satisfied, and insisted that the bag be carried. Berger became obstinate and was thrown out of the museum.

  There are three kinds of thought evident in Berger’s Bento’s Sketchbook. The first is his own text, consisting of the mixture of anecdote, essay, politics, reverie, and poetry that he has been exploring for more than half a century. Second, there are his drawings, most of them in ink, with a few splashes of color, some in charcoal or graphite. Third, there are fragments from the work of the freethinking philosopher Baruch Spinoza, nicknamed Bento, who died in the Netherlands in 1677.

  Bento’s Sketchbook is so named in homage to the sketchbook Spinoza was reputed to have carried around with him, but which was not found among his possessions after his death. The relationship between Berger’s drawings and text in Bento’s Sketchbook is intricate. In one instance, Berger presents a sketch of a dancer seated on the ground, and follows it with the story of his struggle to draw the dancer in question, his friend Maria Muñoz. “The image in my head was often clearer than the one on the paper,” he writes, but eventually he arrives at what he is after. “The effort of my corrections and the endurance of the paper have begun to resemble the resilience of Maria’s own body.” On the next page, in continuation of the argument begun by the drawing and the story, is a typically knotty quotation from Spinoza’s Ethics, which reads, in part: “Although we do not remember that we existed before the body, we sense nevertheless that our mind in so far as it involves the essence of the body under a species of eternity is eternal and its existence cannot be defined by time or explained by duration.”

  This is the technique Berger employs for much of the book. With an unsteady but insistent line, he portrays the faces of friends and artists, a handful of quetsch plums, an old bicycle, a dead badger, and a host of other subjects; and with his clear, sinuous prose, he gives an account of how the contours of reality “harass” the act of drawing. “If the lines of a drawing don’t convey this harassment the drawing remains a mere sign.”

  In some cases, the drawing the text discusses is not reproduced in the book. For his friend Marie-Claude he draws seven irises, an offering to be placed in her coffin the following day. Other drawings, like one of an angel by Luca della Robbia, or another of a dried fig split open, are depicted but not discussed. And certain aspects of the text, like Berger’s digression into the management’s fears of shoplifting at his local supermarket, or his musings about the cruelties of agribusiness, bear no obvious connection to drawing.

  Nevertheless, the book coheres because Berger’s is a humane and uniquely confiding voice, and this voice is co-extensive with his skill as a draftsman. The two attributes act in concert with Spinoza’s enigmatic philosophical propositions. All three constitute a singular act of witness. One of the best drawings in Bento’s Sketchbook is of the Crucifixion by Antonello da Messina. This drawing, we realize, was the modest but ineffable outcome of Berger’s harassed afternoon at the National Gallery.

  Portrait of a Lady

  A PHOTOGRAPHER WORKING IN a commercial studio in West Africa in the twentieth century had a straightforward task: to please his clients. In that sense, the Malian photographer Seydou Keïta was—like his father, who worked as a blacksmith, carpenter, mechanic, and electrician, among other jobs—a craftsman. He was paid by the public to make pictures. But like his esteemed Malian compatriot Malick Sidibé, and like Mama Casset of Senegal and Joseph Moise Agbodjelou of Benin, he produced such fine work that we now consider him a great African artist. These master photographers gave us panoramas of life in Bamako, Dakar, and Porto-Novo, a vivid record of individual people, largely shorn of their names and stories but irrepressibly alive. Here are good clothes gracefully cut, glowing skin, beautifully coiffed hair, polished shoes: all the familiar markers of a person taking pride in his or her appearance. Here’s someone who looks witty, here’s another who looks querulous, another who’s modest, or vain, or sweet. There we see a renegade bra strap slipping off a shoulder, there a large laughing man with a baby, a woman in a bathing suit, youths partying at night with their Afros, bell-bottoms, precious LPs, and endless reserves of cool.

  These photographs are ripostes to the anthropological images of “natives” made by Europeans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those photographs, in which the subjects had no say in how they were seen, did much to shape the Western world’s idea of Africans. Something changed when Africans began to take photographs of one another: you can see it in the way they look at the camera, in the poses, the attitude. The difference between the images taken by colonialists or white adventurers and those made for the sitter’s personal use is especially striking in photographs of women. In the former, women are being looked at against their will, captive to a controlling gaze. In the latter, they look at themselves as in a mirror, an activity that always involves seriousness, levity, and an element of wonder.

  A portrait of this kind is a visual soliloquy. Consider, for instance, one of Keïta’s most famous pictures, now called the Odalisque. A woman reclines in a long dress with fine floral patterning on a bed with a checked bedspread. Her head scarf is polka-dotted. The bed is placed in front of a wall, which is draped with a paisley cloth. And even her face is marked with cicatrices. Then we notice, emerging from this swirling field—a profusion of pattern that brings to mind Matisse at his most inventive—her delicate hands and feet, dark but subtly shaded; the right arm, on which she rests her head; her narrowed eyes. Her look is self-possessed rather than seductive. She’s looking ahead but not at the camera. It is the look of someone who is thinking about herself, simultaneously outward and inward. The image challenges and delights the viewer with its
complicated two-dimensional game.

  Keïta’s and Sidibé’s oeuvres make me think of August Sander’s record of German people in their various occupations in the years between the World Wars, or of Mike Disfarmer’s thousands of portraits taken in Heber Springs, Arkansas: faces peering out of the past, unknown to us but as expressive and intense as those we love. Keïta was not directly influenced by these photographers, or by any of the conventions of photography in the West. In an interview he gave the French gallerist André Magnin in the mid-nineties, he said: “I’ve heard that in your country you have old photographs that are like mine. Well, I’ve never met any foreign photographers, nor seen their photos.” By his own account, he was an original. Looking at the body of his work, we become conscious of implied community, customs, and connections, a world that is perhaps now irretrievable.

  Malick Sidibé—the younger of these two photographers—made many fine portraits as well, generally working with hipper, less formal poses than Keïta did and shooting more often at night and at parties. There’s one portrait of Sidibé’s in particular that I’m always drawn to. A woman stands alone in a sleeveless blouse and an ankle-length skirt. She has sandals on her feet, a pendulous earring in each ear, and hair woven close to her scalp. Her address to the camera is direct. No, she’s not quite alone: a man’s shoulder and arm are visible just to her left. We also see his right shoe and half of his right leg. But the rest of him has been dodged away in the printing of the picture.

  On the brown paper border that frames the photograph are written the words: “Je veux être seule. 1979—Malick Sidibé.” On the right border are Sidibé’s signature and the date 2009. I suppose Sidibé signed this photograph in 2009 and wrote down what the woman told him thirty years earlier, before he had printed the photograph: “Je veux être seule” (“I want to be alone”). This young woman, like many others in Sidibé’s work, has decided her own image. The photo’s peculiarity is the mark of her authority.

  I love the West African women in the photographs by Keïta and Sidibé, some of whom are of my mother’s generation and the generation just before, women to whom a university education was widely available, and for whom working outside the home was a given. In West African photography of this period, there are many photographs of friendship among women, many photographs of women with their families, many of young women with their young men. And there are photos of women alone, some of whom perhaps might also have told the photographer, “Je veux être seule.”

  The confidence visible in photographs like Keïta’s and Sidibé’s can be evoked even when we don’t see the sitters’ faces. J. D. ’Okhai Ojeikere, who was born in Nigeria in 1930 and did most of his work there, understood the expressive possibilities of women’s heads, particularly those crowned with the marvelous array of hairstyles common to many Nigerian ethnic groups. These photographs, made in the years following the country’s independence from Britain in 1960, record evanescent sculptures that are both performance art and temporary body modification. Most of these heads are turned away from us. Has the back of a head ever been more evocative than in these photographs? Ojeikere made hundreds of them, and each head seems to convey an attitude, and even a glance. On the streets of Lagos today, such heads, necks, hairstyles, and elaborately constructed and tied head wraps can still be seen, tableaux vivants of assertive elegance.

  Photographs by Keïta, Sidibé, Agbodjelou, and Ojeikere are united by the period in which they were made as well as by geographical and cultural proximity to one another. There seems to me a correspondence between the energy of these pictures and the optimism and determination of the West African independence movements of the fifties and sixties. The photographs’ legacies have had a powerful effect on twenty-first-century African portraiture, but the contemporary work that most reminds me of them is from farther away on the continent, and made in very different circumstances. Zanele Muholi, one of the most prominent contemporary African photographers, who started working only a few years after the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994, is in a sense a “post-independence” artist. She has tried to document a specific aspect of the country’s new political, social, and economic terrain. One of Muholi’s long-term projects, called Faces and Phases, focuses on the portraiture of black lesbian and transgender people, most of them in South Africa. Like her West African forebears, she shows people as they wish to be seen.

  South Africa is one of the few countries whose constitution protects its citizens from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But persistent prejudice remains a reality for many black South African lesbians and transgender people, many of whom have been raped and even murdered. Muholi’s work is an answer to those who want to wish them away or intimidate them into invisibility. To look at their faces, in portrait after portrait, is to become newly aware of the power of portraiture in a gifted artist’s hands. Muholi doesn’t grant her sitters independence—they are independent—but she makes their independence visible. Faces and Phases is a complete world.

  The work of Keïta and Sidibé, too, makes us aware of an entire world of experiences, one in which men are sometimes secondary. Keïta did well enough from his photo studio that, in the early 1950s, he was able to buy a Peugeot 203. Here is that car, used as a background prop for a group portrait made around 1956, featuring two women and a girl. The women’s dark foreheads and cheekbones are echoed in the Peugeot’s sinuous lines. And way off to the right, touching the hood of the car, is a man’s hand. He has been sidelined, just as the man in Je veux être seule was. But a closer look reveals another man in the picture. He can be seen in the front wheel well of the car, in the gleam of its reflective curve. This second man, dressed in white, is stooped over something. He is the photographer, Seydou Keïta himself, in his limited role, collaborating with the true authors of the image: the women.

  Object Lesson

  IN NOVEMBER 2013, thousands of people gathered in Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the central square in Kiev, to protest their government’s refusal to ratify an agreement with the European Union. The demonstrations went on for months; when brutal attempts were made to stop them, they only became more popular. The crowds were enormous, containing, at times, more than 100,000 people. Many of the photographs from the protests had the organized disorder of medieval battle scenes: spiky barricades, rows of tents, patches of soil and ash, flashes of color where flags were held aloft, sudden brightness from reflections and fires, a great swirl of angry humanity and dark-helmeted riot police massed behind shields, all of it set against backdrops of smoke, fog, or falling snow. So epic and cinematic were the photographs from the Maidan that it took some effort to remember that they were first and foremost news images, unstaged depictions of real, ongoing human suffering.

  In her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography, Susan Sontag identified a feeling of helpless voyeurism that comes over us as we look at photographs of people in the midst of conflict. She also wrote about how repeatedly seeing such images could anesthetize the vision and deaden the conscience. Sontag understood photographs of conflict to be making a utilitarian argument—that they could bring us into a state of productive shock—and she showed that they seldom did what they claimed, or hoped, to do. The more photographs shock, the more difficult it is for them to be pinned to their local context, and the more easily they are indexed to our mental library of generic images. What, then, are we to do with a thrilling photograph that is at the same time an image of pain?

  In becoming part of a family of familiar cinematic images that includes Throne of Blood and Alexander Nevsky, but also The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, the spectacular photos from Ukraine stopped doing what they were ostensibly made for. They supplied some aesthetic satisfaction, as well as a jolt of outrage, but they told us very little about the particular politics of the protests, much less what to think about it or do in response. Conflict photography comes with built-in risks for the photographers, who put themselves in harm’s way to bring us news, but also, in a less
visceral way, for us, the viewers. If it is done well, it can move us to think of art and pop culture (“it’s just like a movie”), instead of the suffering it depicts. If it is not done well, if the images are not formally compelling, it might lose its claim on even our momentary attention.

  There are other kinds of photographs, though, that can present particular crises without also giving us the feeling that it has all been seen before. There are photographic projects that document survivors long after war. Others use archival or found images to consider violence. Yet another approach is to take photographs that exclude humans: destroyed buildings, detritus-strewn battlefields, aerial photographs of damaged landscapes. An intriguing subset of that last category depicts domestic objects whose meaning has been altered in the aftermath of a calamity. The shock of the Ukrainian conflict is conveyed in one way by a photo of riot police dragging a protester through the snow, and in quite another way by an image of a ruined kitchen, like the one by the Ukrainian photographer Sergei Ilnitsky.

  In Ilnitsky’s photograph, taken in August 2013 in Donetsk, a major city in the eastern part of Ukraine, a length of white lace is swept to the left side. Like a theatrical curtain, it reveals a table with a teapot, a bowl full of tomatoes, a can, two mugs, and two paring knives on a little cutting board. It is a still life, but it is in utter disarray. Broken glass and dust are everywhere, and one of the mugs is shattered; to the right, across the lace curtain, the shards of glass, and the table, is a splatter of red color that could only be one thing. Domestic objects imply use, and Ilnitsky’s photograph pulls our minds toward the now lost tranquillity of the people who owned these items. How many cups of coffee were made in that kitchen? Who bought those tomatoes? Were there children in this household who did their homework on this table? Whose blood is that? The absence of people in the photograph makes room for these questions.