Dennis Ioffe

Brief Intro to the Transcendental Way of (Photo)narration. (Deciphering Eugene Gorny¹)

1.1. New intuition and imagism

      Vilem Flusser², a Czech-German not so widely advertised and appreciated Judeo-Christian philosopher of photography and phenomenological aesthesis once has noted that: “the old imagination is the mere ability to make images of (external or ‘internal’) circumstances, and the converse ability to recognize these circumstances in the images. In other words: the ability to encode phenomena in two-dimensional symbols and to read these symbols. – The “new imagination” (Einbildung) means the transcoding of algorithms into images, i.e., the translating of numbers into lines, surfaces, and henceforth into bodies and animated bodies. The new imaginists are people who attempt to turn automatic apparatuses against automation.”.

       I’d like to believe that the represented above photo-works of Eugene Gorny might epitomize him as this kind of ‘new imaginist’,  charging his viewer to take some deep mystified breath in order to deal with his universal meta-narrative, the chosen natural objects left by the cosmic scapes of visionary transgression. And no one else but Flusser can provide us with one of the best definitions potentially applied to the photographical venture tied with Gorny’s visionary enterprise; where the photo itself is something but “…an image of a magical scene, automatically and necessarily produced and distributed by a programmed apparatus in the course of a game depending on chance, and whose symbols make the viewer receptive to an improbable behavior”. Magical scene and, we should add, ‘transcendental object’, perfectly bound within Kant’s aesthetic universe of ‘unspeakable’ or ‘unreasonable’ system of human activity (critique).

       To remember as Adelheid Mers³ has chosen a very ‘speaking’ design-form of illustrating some of Flusser’s recurrent ideas by stressing the realm of Cosmos and Universe as of ‘Pluriverse’ – of a medium with endless possibilities for the meta-physical expression.

“After Vilem Flusser: Change of Paradigms”, 2003.

        We are accomplished to call for the infamous Kant’s term of ‘intellectual intuition’ which has empowered Kant to contrast the ‘intellectual’ versus the ‘sensible’ types of intuition (Anschauung). The passivity and activity ought to perform an important function in this system of thought differentiating between the objects which are organized in ‘passive’ sensible intuition in front of objects which were created by an ‘active’ form of intellectual intuition. (One should remark that only the ‘Absolute’ can really dispose of the ultimate kind of this Kantian ‘intellectual intuition’). Eugene Gorny’s photo works are designed to facilitate our perceptive in visual landscape that surrounds us. I would go further to conjecture that one may endure some sense of meditation, of a deliberate flow of focused attention directed toward the outward face of the visual representation bound to the inward. I believe it could be well judged from the works of Gorny that his photo-artistic vision stands on and plays with precisely that kind of intuitive meditation that arises from the multiplicity of our daily experience. Apart from Kant one may take into account  the corresponding points to be found in William James’ psychology (‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’⁴) or, perhaps, more concretely in the opus magnum of Rudolf Otto⁵; indeed, what are the majority of Gorny’s visual narrations if not the clear and painstaking descriptive expressions of this ubiquitous idea of the ‘numinous’⁶ (the non-rational and intuitive ‘holy’ in its essence and manifestation if to borrow Gerardus Van Der Leeuw’s⁷ words describing the coterminous aspects from phenomenological standpoints).

2.2.  Boredom-beater

       Another inspiring propagator of the nascent photography⁸, who came from almost the same cultural milieu as Flusser was much more universally known theorist Siegfried Kracauer.

       In Kracauer’s collection of essays first published in English in 1995⁹ there is one very original text dated by 1924 with a telling title of “Boredom”. A wide-circulated on the Web citation form there says that “…Boredom becomes the only proper occupation, since it provides a kind of guarantee that one is, so to speak, still in control of one’s existence... One flirts with ideas that even become quite respectable in the process, and one considers various projects that, for no reason, pretend to be serious. Eventually one becomes content to do nothing more than be with oneself, without knowing what one actually should be doing... And in ecstasy you name what you have always lacked: the great passion”.¹⁰

       The pictures made by Eugene Gorny are implicitly engrossed in some dubious ‘relationship’ with boredom of surrounding life. How it happens, Gorny might wonder that any, even openly ‘dull’ stuff will suddenly gain a sparkling flash of some ‘shklovskian’ sort of ‘estrangement’ – i.e. of defamilarizing feature aimed at breaking the dense boredom of the everyday automatism. The snapshots of Gorny are by no means ‘dull’ but they are to some extent ‘construed’ of pretty ‘ordinary’ and ‘bored’ elements, never, however (at least not very frequently) juxtaposed together.

       As Meir Wigoder has noted on some other occasion, describing that particular ‘ability’ of photo-instrument to break the ‘spatiality’ of the moment (and it stands, I believe for actual killing the ‘boring’ potential of an artistic photograph): “The camera is only capable of capturing a brief moment that accentuates space rather than temporality. The medium of subjective memory, however, can shatter the space-time configuration in order to piece the salvaged fragments together into a new meaningful order”¹¹.

       Elsewhere Wigoder proceeds with formulating the spheres of ‘optical unconscious’ so important not only for Kracauer but to Benjamin as well. This idea of building up a ‘general inventory’ of surrounding spaces, done with the abilities of photography should sound relevant for understanding many of Gorny’s artistic efforts : “…in Kracauer’s dialectical fashion, the fault he found in photography’s capacity to merely stockpile the elements of nature becomes an asset once the photographs are piled and viewed en masse. In this new order, belonging to the “general inventory” of the catalogue, photography can yield information that hitherto was unnoticed. In writing that “it is the task of photography to disclose this previously unexamined foundation of nature”, Kracauer anticipates Benjamin’s definition of photography’s optical unconscious that enables an image to store and release meanings that were neither perceived by the photographer nor recognized by his peers...”.

       In our view, the main issue here may be a constant struggle between intuition and automation which, at least in Gorny’s case finishes with the noticeable defeat of the latter.

3.3. The glas and the lens vs the eye’s pupil

       It is a common knowledge, that the ‘success’ of a photographer relies greatly on the correct ‘measurement’ of the reaction that his work produces in human eyes. The perfect calculus of such a ‘reaction’ should guarantee a greater degree of ‘appeal’ that this product may or may not acquire. With Gorny this almost trivial ‘truth’ gains a new and ambiguous exploration; for we just don’t know (in many cases) exactly how he succeeds in capturing our mind as through some unnoticeable eye drops which are somehow instilled to dilate our eye’s pupil. What do we know, by the way, about the ‘eye’s pupil’, except for some general facts: it shrinks in bright light and expands in the dark? The entire mechanics is of course much more complicated.

       Ali Hossaini in his truly fascinating article¹² chose to illustrate some of his ideas with a very meaningful scheme-understanding of human eye:

The structure of the eye compared to the camera: taken from Wald, George (1953) ‘Eye and Camera’ in Scientific American Reader, New York, Simon and Schuster.

       The author notes further linking the obvious dependence of camera to the human organ of sight: “Much like a camera, human eyes augment the pinhole effect with a lens, bringing an inverted image to bear on a light-sensitive surface, the retina”¹³.

       A brief invention into the immediate history of this topic seems to answer the deep presupposition with regard to the shocking inter-changeability of two things – the photo-camera and the biological construct: “Photographs function by reproducing the vantage of the eye, and the analogy between eyes and cameras runs deep. As Kuhne first demonstrated, the eye is a camera, and vice versa, and they can sometimes be exchanged. Our understanding of the brain is on the increase; it seems likely that, in the near future, cameras will induce vision through direct neural implants. When fed directly to the brain, media becomes immediate, more like an environment than an overlay”¹⁴.

       This playful idea of similarity in both of the objects is well assisting the author to develop his thesis on the unique ‘convergence’ between the artificial technology and biological nature: “…McLuhan’s description of an optical-electronic nervous system may have sounded fictional when he uttered it, but it is rapidly becoming true in the fundamental sense, mainly because media now integrates our perceptual apparatus. The convergence of technology with biology continues on the level of image processing. Like human vision, the camera produces internal representations of the world which can be recalled and manipulated. Fidelity is key to photography and natural perception because both are directed toward depicting an environment that must be exploited for navigation, communication and survival. Thus the ontology of the photograph derives from its fundamental utility as a representation of the visual environment - and from the act of vision itself”¹⁵.
It seems that the ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ in the case of photographic art are non-separable and destined to a fruitful coexistence in a coequal process of eternal integration.

       The ‘ontology’ of photograph which Ali Hossaini is speaking of should receive a distinct and penetrating contribution in works of Gorny. To my mind it can also illustrate the potential durability and cohesion of Eugene’s artistic interests with the previous subventions of the more ‘conventional’ photographers. And in this sense, Gorny has to be anchored within a rare camp of innovators who are more interested with the tradition than it is sometimes routinely declared or believed to.

Notes