That line came to me a few minutes ago, as I looked and read through the latest photographic blog posts by Stephen Lewis in his blog, Bubkes). This one…
… titled Farmyard, Grandmother, Chicken, and Ovid in Exile, is accompanied by richly detailed text, including this:
The courtyard in the photo no longer exists; it and and the vegetable garden were uprooted several years ago. in their place: a summer-time restaurant surrounded by neatly planted flowerbeds and a tall antenna tower of a mobile telephony company resting on a broad concrete footing. The grandmother still lives on the plot, however, and tends the little that remains of her garden. She is in her late-eighties now and, at day’s end, often sits on the raised curb of the newly paved road next to her former farmyard in expectation of passersby…
Nothing is permanent, but in this case the more durable feature is the grandmother and her friendly face — the face of the place, while she lasts.
Also arresting is Corn Stalks, a Plateau, the Black Sea, and the Horizon:
It’s a place that calls to mind face in its verb form. A synonym might be to meet, or to confront. We face a challenge, an opportunity, a problem, success, failure, or the world. Things face us as well, but not always directly. Three of the four things in the photo are mostly hidden by the first, but far more vast and open. Also flat. Horizons may feature mountains, but they are horizontal: flat and wide.
We are walking and running animals that work best in the horizontal. Our eyes shift more easily to left and right than to up and down. Our stereoscopic vision and hearing also locate best in the horizontal spread from one here to many theres.
Our species dispersed from Africa toward gone horizons, mostly along coasts long since drowned by melting ice caps. The Black Sea has changed greatly in spread and shape throughout human history, and may have reached its present height in a deluge through the Dardanelles and Bosporus seaways.
The view on the path in the photo is framed between the vertical blinders of dry corn stalks at the edges of fields of unseen vastness. (Corn fields have always been both beautiful and a tiny bit creepy to me, ever since I got a bit lost when wandering as a kid into a cornfield somewhere, with no clear direction out other than the sound of distant voices.)
Between the last paragraph and this one, Stephen posted another photo, titled Shabla, Bulgaria: Seawards and Kitchenwards, taken on the shore of the Black Sea:
The subject is mostly boats and ramps. In the foreground are stairs and wood railings, two of the many literal and figurative framings, none quite horizontal, in a vertical photo with dimensions we call “portrait.” On the face of this Bulgarian shore, one ear is the sea itself. All the ramps face land and sea. To them the camera is an unseen visitor from another dimension.
While seeing and hearing are mostly horizontal (our ears as well as our eyes are aligned with the horizon), eating is vertical: food is something we “eat up” and “get down.” So is nutrition: we “raise” crops and cattle.”
In Stephen’s photos, things have faces too. Some are literal, such as in Guns of August, Books of August: The Iconography of a Gravestone in Prague:
The photo puts in contrast the irony of cemetery “monuments” (as gravestones are now called), commemorating stuff nobody alive remembers, for an audience a living performer might round to zero. Under the subhead The Emotions of the Living; the Passivity of the Dead, Stephen writes,
The photo above, taken in the immense cemetery in the late-19th/early-20th century residential quarter of Vinohrady, portrays a gravestone tableau of life’s emotionized figures that reveals the ways that those in the comfort and safety of the home-front consciously or unconsciously sanitized, rationalized, and ennobled the senseless carnage of World War I.
Last month I visited the graves of relatives three generations and more ahead of mine, at Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, and reported on that visit in Lives of the Dead. While some graves at Woodlawn yearned toward the kind of extravagance Stephen found in Vinohrady, my late kinfolk leaned in the opposite direction, marking little or nothing of who they planted there. To my knowledge, I was the first to surface (at those last two links) twenty Englerts, Knoebels and others whose faces in death are carpets of mowed grass.
And who knows how long anything will last on the Web? My old blog, on which I wrote from 1999-2007, survives by the grace of a friend, and its blogroll is a near-cemetery of rotting links.
Every thing faces a future for as long as we grace it with expectation of use, appreciation or some other goodness. Why else save anything?
So I’m glad Stephen keeps putting these photos up, and enlarging them so well with prose. Here’s a list of other photos in his series, posted since the last time I last blogged his series:
- Stone Cliffs, Stone Beach, Stone Walls, Lord of Stone
- Past Glory: Abandoned Mineral Bath Pavilion, Sofia, Bulgaria
- Guns of August, Books of August: The Iconography of a Gravestone in Prague
- Literary Interlude: Graffito, Sofia, Bulgaria
- Monochrome Interlude: Night, Side Street, Şişhane Quarter, Istanbul
- Reflective Interlude: A Saturday Afternoon, Beşiktaş, Istanbul
- Colorful Interlude: Tarlebaşi Quarter, Istanbul
- The Church of St. James the Martyr, Poduyane Quarter, Sofia, Bulgaria: A Careless Assumption, a Careless Bombardment, and the Benefits of a Once-Strong Back
- Courtyard, Sofia, Bulgaria: Two Views, New Viewpoint
- A Great Day in Meriçleri
- A Musical Interlude: Two Musicians, Two Instruments, Two Moods
- Istanbul, From Piyale Paşa to Bomonti and Back: A Half-Century of Urban Dynamics in Three Non-Stereotypic Views
It’s a wonderful gallery. Enjoy.
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