It might seem to be a self-portrait but it is about a gesture, made at the moment when the shutter is released, the brief, balanced moment of hovering: “des Dastehns großer Anfangsbuchstab.” Stephen Mitchell translates this phrase from Rainer Maria Rilke’s fifth Duino Elegy about Picasso’s family of acrobats as “the large capital D that begins Duration.”
But duration is “Dauer” in German. “Dastehn” means “to stand there.” It has the connotation, yes, of enduring, but also of being on display, like a decorated großer Anfangsbuchstab, or “initial” that begins a new chapter in an illuminated manuscript.
Rilke’s acrobats alight on their carpet, but they are there only a split second; they stand there, balanced, perhaps each body arched or the whole troop in sync to form a great “D,” while time momentarily stands still and they have barely enough time for that first letter of duration or of Dastehen.
A photograph commences with a similar split second. As soon as the photographer catches the “decisive moment” it already unravels, and the tumblers tumble again. The shutter, once released, may create a photograph, but a released shutter does not capture a moment; the moment is already gone. Photography shares with acrobatics such oddly eternal moments that cannot last.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, who famously applied the phrase “The Decisive Moment” to photography and photographed many such moments himself, understood. He regarded the photographic process as one of balance: A balance,” he wrote, “must be established between these two worlds – the one inside us and the one outside us. As the result of a constant reciprocal process, both these worlds come to form a single one.” The photographer’s decisive moment, like that of the acrobat, is not based on the knowledge of when to leap, but rather on the ability to prepare for that leap. Like a musician, a photographer must master an instrument. How long did it take Cartier-Bresson, and countless photojournalists, to learn how to aim his Leica precisely in situations – for example in the middle of a crowd – where it is impossible to hold the camera at eye level and look through the viewfinder?
And how long did he wait, poised by the large puddle, his camera trained on the spot beyond the ladder where someone interesting was bound to jump across?
It can take hours of preparation, followed by waiting. How long did Thomas Struth wait for the right instant in a museum or on a street, his huge camera primed and ready on its tripod, Struth sometimes himself balanced the whole time – on a ladder? In a museum it helps to choose viewers of a significant attraction; otherwise his ladder and his huge apparatus might steal too much of the attention on its own.
But a self-portrait can hope to be a portrait of the decisive moment itself. In the self-portrait, reciprocity, if there is any, must be a feedback loop: the image of photographing and the image photographed, the photographer, the subject, and the moment are all one.
In the instant of photographing, the cable release and the small ground glass viewer of a Rolleiflex allow the photographer to savor the moment of balance, self against self, mirror against screen. With the action concentrated in the camera, still and untouched on a tripod (no need to hold it steady), its screen, like those on later digital cameras and cell phones, makes it possible to glance back and forth between the self in the mirror and the self on the ground glass like two people facing one another across a room. A gesture, concentrated in the hand holding the release, creates and wants to preserve the moment of balance.
The “selfie” generally doesn’t want to preserve so much as to disseminate. It is almost always given away immediately. Sometimes you see the hand, or an arm (usually you can’t), but in a group selfie its gesture offers to create community.
When it bounces back, and social media ensure that it can, it creates community once again.
A selfie taken alone might still create a relationship. A teenager sending a selfie of herself to her boyfriend is, as I have written elsewhere, “teleporting herself as a gift.” [in Touching Photographs, Chicago, 2012] A lone selfie can sometimes reach for contemplation. A friend of mine used to take such selfies often, contemplating herself intently it would seem, on a small screen, itself trained on a large mirror, oblivious to the surroundings. But it, too, invites social interaction that, when shared, initiates an invitation.
When my own image appears in the course of my own projects, it nearly always does so in mirrors or reflections, when I notice myself – and my camera – in part of my visual field.
What results is not a selfie or a self-portrait, or even really a signature moment, like the reflection of Eugène Atget or Lee Friedlander in a shop window or a shadow. It is quite ordinary street photography with myself as a subject. Usually, it is a product of waiting, a moment when, looking for something interesting in my visual field, I fail to find anything but myself. Such a photograph, then, is about waiting, pure waiting, without anything to photograph and with no “decisive moment” to balance.
Waiting. Like Picasso’s acrobats. Picasso, after all, portrays his family of acrobats not balancing, not tumbling, but waiting by the side of a road. They stand there, and let Picasso’s artistry inscribe them in a delicate D-shaped balance, a decisive moment of Picasso’s own creation.
text and photographs, where not otherwise noted: margaret olin © 2019
This post was inspired by a temporary facebook collection curated several years ago by Liese Ricketts, and by memories of my first reading of Rilke’s Duineser Elegien several decades ago with the late Manfred Hoppe. Thanks to Rita Mendes-Flohr.