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Category: PhotoFiles

A Student Lamentation (And the Fizzy Drink Man)


A Student Lamentation, originally uploaded by loscuadernosdejulia.

I think one of the biggest differences that struck me upon coming to study in England in 2003 was an almost complete absense of graffiti on the desks at the study rooms and in the library. Well, five years later the things seem to have changed, as both photos plainly illustrate. In truth, since the start of this academic year I have seen several phone numbers and random phrases inscribed on the desks, but the desk I happened to sit at this afternoon was too precious to ignore. One commentator lamented the state of female beauty at the medical faculty, while another unveiled to us a new kind of hunk, who’s got the jars of Fanta, Coke, and 7UP implanted in his otherwise flat stomach. All in all, both graffitis are funny, witty, and entertaining, which I, my student years still fairly fresh in my memory, can delight in. But one can only wonder what will happen when the entire desk will be covered with scriptures and drawings, and the visitor, instead of reading, will innocently succumb to browsing the surface of the desk…

A Man Revised

Irises (Lawrence and Van Gogh)

D. H. Lawrence, Scent of Irises (from Amores, New York: 1916).

A faint, sickening scent of irises
Persists all morning. Here in a jar on the table
A fine proud spike of purple irises
Rising above the class-room litter, makes me unable
To see the class’s lifted and bended faces
Save in a broken pattern, amid purple and gold and
sable.

I can smell the gorgeous bog-end, in its breathless
Dazzle of may-blobs, when the marigold glare overcast
you
With fire on your cheeks and your brow and your
chin as you dipped
Your face in marigold bunch, to touch and contrast
you,
Your own dark mouth with the bridal faint lady-smocks,
Dissolved in the golden sorcery you should not
outlast.

You amid the bog-end yellow incantation,
You sitting on the cowslips of the meadow above,
Me, your shadow on the bog-flame, flowery may-blobs,
Me full length in the cowslips, muttering you love;
You, your soul like a lady-smock, lost, evanescent,
You with your face all rich, like the sheen of a dove.

You are always asking, do I remember, remember
The butter-cup bog-end where the flowers rose up
And kindled you over deep with a cast of gold?
You ask again, do the healing days close up
The open darkness which they drew us in,
The dark which then drank up our brimming cup.

You upon the dry, dead beech-leaves, in the fire of
night
Burnt like a sacrifice; you invisible;
Only the fire of darkness, and the scent of you!
– And yes, thank God, it is still possible
The healing days shall close the darkness up
Wherein we fainted like a smoke or dew.

Like vapour, dew, or poison. Now, thank God,
The fire of night has gone, and your face is ash
Indistinguishable on the grey, chill day;
The night has burnt us out, at last the good
Dark fire burns on untroubled, without clash
Of you upon the dead leaves saying me Yea.

Illustration: Vincent van Gogh, Irises (1890).

Links: D. H. Lawrence – Celebrating a Literary Life: an excellent resource for “students, academic researchers and members of the general public with an interest in Lawrence and his work“. Includes a virtual tour of Lawrence’s landmark place in Nottinghamshire.

The Attitudes to Corporal Punishment

Following on from Max Ernst who peeked on Our Lady punishing the Child – here are two instances of attitude to corporal punishment. The poem Nieman kan mit gerten by the Middle High German lyric poet Walther von der Vogelweide (left) was probably composed at the turn of the 12th-13th cc. I have known it in Russian long before I began to study Medieval and Early Modern History, but here is a good English translation below. As the translator Graeme Dunphy notes, this gnomic poem has got a nice palindromic structure, i.e. every stanza consists of eight lines repeated from 1st to 4th and back, from 4th to 1st.

As close as they are to our hearts today, in his own time Vogelweide’s words had generally fallen on deaf ears, and a very different attitude (or rather practice) is commemorated in the frescoes at the apsidal chapel at Sant’Agostino in San Gimigniano, near Siena in Italy. The cycle of frescoes known as The Episodes from Life of St Augustine was composed between 1464 and 1465 by Benozzo Gozzoli and a few of his pupils, and The School of Tagaste (right) on the north wall is particularly well-known, for its representation of a teaching practice. If we suppose that Walther’s poem could be composed about 1200, then it is indeed striking how forward-thinking he had been, and how little had changed 265 years later!

More on:

San Gimignano

Sant’Agostino

Fresco cycle of St Augustine by Benozzo Gozzoli (1464-1465)

Walther von der Vogelweide, Neiman kan mit gerten (transl. by Graeme Dunphy)

No-one can obtain
Good children by the cane.
To those in whom true virtues grow
A word is mightier than a blow.
A word is mightier than a blow
To those in whom true virtues grow.
Good children by the cane
No-one can obtain.
A guard upon your tongue!
Good counsel for the young!
Throw the bolt across the door,
Let wicked words escape no more.
Let wicked words escape no more,
Throw the bolt across the door.
Good counsel for the young:
A guard upon your tongue!
A guard upon your eyes!
Always this is wise!
Let them see whatever’s good,
Shield them from what’s coarse and rude.
Shield them from what’s coarse and rude,
Let them see whatever’s good.
Always this is wise:
A guard upon your eyes!
A guard upon your ears!
A fool is what he hears!
If opened up to words ill-bred,
They’ll bring dishonour on your head.
They’ll bring dishonour on your head
If opened up to words ill-bred.
A fool is what he hears;
A guard upon your ears!
A guard upon all three!
They’re prone to be too free.
Tongue, eyes, ears are often base,
Inviting scandal and disgrace.
Inviting scandal and disgrace,
Tongue, eyes, ears are often base.
They’re prone to be too free.
A guard upon all three!

Manuel Alvarez Bravo on Art and Technology

The question of art is not a question of spontaneous feelings. It is not a question of emotionality, but of the knowledge of how to make things, how to realise something consciously. Everything functions in the brain. Even art. And, since one keeps developing and gaining an understanding of a work of art, the question of art is always a question of culture.
 
The photographer receives what he is given. […] Technology develops and the individual is given more possibilities. But he is neither better nor worse because of those possibilities. […] The question of technology has nothing to do with new or old apparatus or methods. The question is only about the capacity of man to acquire culture and express it. It would never occur to me to do digital work in photography, because I have – within myself – my own development.
 
Technological advances are double-edged. What a marvel, the automobile! […] But what happens? The individual becomes more dependent on the automobile, and the automobile needs other phenomena to keep it going, and very soon it becomes a great muddle. Eventually, as we have more and more inventions, the individual becomes more and more separated from society. He stays more and more in his house, among his books, within himself.

Like many other photoartists, Alvarez Bravo drew inspiration from painting and literature. Below are the two fine examples. First is Lucy, his new take on the image of St Lucy (whose attribute was her eyes that were poked during the tortures). I chose the 16th c. painting by Domenico di Pace Beccafumi (1484-1551), although Alvarez Bravo clearly had more to say in his photo, and this is not a mere ‘resemblance’ of eyes to nipples. Frederic Kaufman whose extensive interviews with the photographer made up an introduction to Aperture monograph about Alvarez Bravo (Manuel Alvarez Bravo: Photographs and Memories (Aperture, Vol 147)) recalls a visit to the house where the master was born. The building in 20, Guatemala, right behind the cathedral, by the 1990s housed two commercial stalls on the ground floor. In one of these, Kaufman says, ‘I sink my hands into a bowl of glass eyeballs‘. These were “saint’s eyes”, and on the plate in the photo we probably see such a pair.

Another is Big Fish Eat Little Ones, titled almost precisely after a 1556 painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder Big Fish Eat Little Fish.

London: Impression du Matin (Wilde and Graham)

The Thames nocturne of blue and gold
Changed to a Harmony in grey:
A barge with ochre-coloured hay
Dropped from the wharf: and chill and cold

The yellow fog came creeping down
The bridges, till the houses’ walls
Seemed changed to shadows, and St Paul’s
Loomed like a bubble o’er the town.

Then suddenly arose the clang
Of waking life; the streets were stirred
With country waggons: and a bird
Flew to the glistening roofs and sang.

But one pale woman all alone,
The daylight kissing her wan hair,
Loitered beneath the gas lamps’ flare,
With lips of flame and heart of stone.

Illustration: Thomas Graham, Alone in London (1904). St Paul’s can actually be seen at the very background.

Audenesque Thoughts of the Prince

“Time will say nothing, but I told you so/ Time only knows the price we have to pay“, soberly reflected Wystan Hugh Auden in his well-known poem. Diane Arbus, when working on a feature for November 1961 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, visited Prince Robert de Rohan Courtenay (left) and copied this from his corpus of writing:

So with growth, changing environment and vagaries of fortune, the facets of a man’s life so vary, in a seeming and rapid inconsistency, that he appears to live his life as a succession of characters – in different dramas – sometimes high, sometimes low – and his innermost secrets are hidden in Time; and Time knows nothing! To outsiders, the personal history of anyone is merely a legend, imperfectly understood – and a fable believed and agreed upon!

(a quote and photo are from Diane Arbus: Magazine Work).

Sleeping Jesus and Spanking Madonna

We are surely used to the baby Jesus being painted as a healthy kid with big cheeks. He can be suckling on his mother’s breast, or playing with John the Baptist, or otherwise having good time on his mother’s lap.

Unfortunately, we may forget that Jesus was, after all, human in some ways. As far as his babyhood goes, just as he could suckle on his mother’s breast, so could he fall asleep, as babies do. This is precisely what Parmigianino, the Italian Mannerist artist of the 16th c., observed in his famous painting, Madonna dal Collo Lungo (Madonna with the Long Neck, left). As art historians would observe, this is a re-working of the pietà theme. We see Madonna adoringly gazing at her son, who is prostrated on her knees in his innocent slumber. The angels are watching and one of them is holding a jug with the Cross in it – a sign of the baby’s future Passions.

Madonna dal Collo Lungo was painted towards the end of Parmigianino’s life, and Giorgio Vasari in his Lives notes that the artist was not altogether content with the painting. It is dated by 1539, so when Michelangelo made his drawing in about 1560, he would have known about the one by Parmigianino. Today we have a painting based on Michelangelo’s, and the artist, Marcello Venusti, another Mannerist, made it in about 1565. Its full title is The Holy Family (left), but since Venusti’s time it’s been dubbed ‘Il Silenzio‘, and one can easily guess, why. Indeed, we see Christ falling asleep on his mother’s knees, apparently as she was reading to him. The feeling is different to the one we see in Madonna dal Collo Lungo: the baby’s slumber evidently took everyone by surprise, but while St. John the Baptist is making a “silenzio” sign, Joseph and Maria aren’t quite amused. It is also interesting to note Maria’s pose: I cannot instantly remember any painting in which her legs would be crossed. At any rate, the scene we see in this painting after Michelangelo’s drawing could possibly provoke the scene depicted by Max Ernst in his Virgin Spanking the Christ Child Before the Three Witnesses (1926, right).

On Il Silenzio‘s page on the National Gallery website there is an interesting comment about John the Baptist in Michelangelo-Venusti painting, that he is “mysteriously attired in a leopard skin (rather than the traditional camel skin)“. It seems to me that the drawing Michelangelo made could be a kind of hommage to Parmigianino, who, it was well-known and mentioned in Vasari’s Lives, greatly admired the work of both Michelangelo and Rafael. The reason for this is that in Parmigianino’s most celebrated work, The Vision of St. Jerome (right), on which he worked during the Sack of Rome in 1527, we see John the Baptist in the foreground, wearing leopard’s skin. And although the red and blue were the usual colours of Maria’s dress, they nevertheless were not the only combination. Again, it can be significant to an extent that in Venusti’s painting we see Madonna attired in the clothes of the same colours as in The Vision of St. Jerome.

Face To Face With To Be Or Not To Be


Judge Jeffereys’ Noose, originally uploaded by Still The Oldie.

This is the site called “Judge Jeffereys’ Noose” by the old Thames tavern “The Prospect of Whitby”, photographed by Martyn from Toronto, Canada. According to the story he mentions in the photo’s description, England’s famous “Hanging Judge” “would sit on the terrace of the tavern and sup ale until the tides had washed three times over the unfortunate condemned”.

I’ve never been to this site in London, but in Clifton, where I previously lived, one of the cemeteries was actually encircled by houses. And many times did I think: what is it like to look at the burial ground from your window? This is no longer about being aware of death, or thinking whether those who leave us actually continue being present in spirit. When I visited that cemetery on an early morning in January 2005, I noticed many children graves or memorial tablets, flowers, and family messages. Surely, to witness the burials or visits to the graveyard on a daily basis must be a life-changing experience?

Same here: I don’t know if there are any houses around, but the tavern is still running, and people still walk past this site in London. The question that now puzzles me is not whether a passer-by is aware of how many men and women had ended up as gallow birds on this very spot. I’m wondering how living close to sites like this or near a cemetery changes a person. This is not a block somewhere in the Tower which you may visit once in your life and forget about. Neither is it an historic prison yard where, a guide tells you, they executed a good number of folk.

Do people who live by the cemetery learn to be “philosophical”, i.e. their acceptance of, and compassion for, the burials and the visits to the cemetery reaches the point when one dissociates oneself from viewing? Do they take the move to live by the burial ground as a sign to contemplate “eternal” subjects, like Life and Death? Or do they simply take a practical view of things, in the light of which there are the living and the dead, and both need rooms which sometimes happen to be in the same house?

A Picturesque Lesson for the Victorians

The paintings on the left and right are titled, respectively, My First Sermon (1863) and My Second Sermon (1864). They were painted by one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Sir John Everett Millais. In both we see a lovely child, who in the first picture, as the title suggests, is all excitement to attend her first sermon. Although the second picture was painted a year later, this is not at all reflected in the painting itself. We see the same lovely little girl and thereby assume that very little time passed between the two pictures. Only this time the child is innocently asleep.

What is interesting about both paintings is that they use a theme and a motif that were of particular popularity in Victorian England. Childhood was so popular a theme that at one point the curator of the exhibition remarked that everywhere in the salon were children’s portraits, and that artists who would come to visit the exhibition would be looking at little else but kids of all shapes and conditions painted by other artists. The motif that was repeatedly evoked was that of sleeping girls and women. And so both found their way into the painting.

But what is also important if that the girl has fallen asleep during the sermon. We have come to hold an image of Victorian England as that of a country very rigorous in its piety. No wonder therefore that children as young as the girl in the painting were encouraged to attend sermons which were expected to instruct them in good faith. However, the message of the second painting was so explicit that the Archbishop of Canterbury concluded thus:

“I have learnt a very wholesome lesson… I see a little lady here… who, by the eloquence of her silent slumber, has given us a warning of the evil of lengthy sermons and drowsy discources“.

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