“Falcon,” said Olivier, as he turned away. His face, usually pale and framed by dark, somewhat wavy hair, reddened.
Instinctively, I knew that this would be one of those awkward moments. More likely for him than for me. I knew also that he was struggling with language. French was his native language and as fluent as he is in English, there were times like this when the translation was difficult.
“It’s OK,” I said, attempting to be reassuring, “your English is far better than my French.”
The conversation started simply enough. Both Oliviers, JD and I were “summing up” the day. It has been both interesting and intense. It was our second day in Paris and, with the exception of an hour or so for lunch, JD and I had been in one meeting after another. The four of us were about to go to dinner — it was nearing 8:00 PM Paris time — and I had asked what I had taken to be a rather simple question. How is our work different?
The initial conversation centered around the fact that all our work has a similar, identifiable “look and feel” that is the result of an internal discipline that begins even before we start a shoot and continues through post processing.
But I sensed there was something more.
“To be completely honest,” Olivier began. His countenance was deeply serious. More serious than I had ever seen him.
“It’s OK, Olivier, I won’t be offended.”
“I do not like some of your photos. It is not that they are not good, I just do not like them.” I could tell he was determined to find the words to express exactly what he was feeling as concisely as possible. To be honest, I was intrigued more than I was offended. Clearly, the issue wasn’t with the technical aspects of our work. We had just spent some time looking at a number of our more complex images — particularly from a series I call “Caravaggio” and it was clear that they found what we were able to do fascinating. It was something more.
Olivier’s face became redder still.
“How do you say,” he continued, flustered enough to be struggling for words, “they are disturbing. All those beautiful women. Such sadness. I do not like this. Why do they never smile?” He paused and brought his face, still red, to me. “Why do you do this? Why do you not have photos of them smiling?”
“That’s a very good question,” I responded. I hadn’t ever thought about what he was saying. I didn’t see the fact that I don’t often photograph models smiling as a problem either. Obviously, it was. And if it were a problem for him, well, then it would be a problem for others.
More profoundly, I had never thought of my work as disturbing. Well, I admit that some of the images could be, but, I had always thought that those images were few in number. Apparently not. At first I thought that he was referring to some of the photographs of women in cemeteries. But then I realized, he was referring to more than that. I tried to put his comments in context but to no avail.
“It is like you are provoking us.”
I paused rather than respond. I wanted to make sure my response was measured. Understandable. Accurate.
“Not all art is beautiful,” I thought. “No, that won’t work,” I said to myself. “Art is about many things. There is beauty in sadness just as there is beauty in joy. Sometimes art is intended to provoke a reaction. Sadness is a very powerful emotion and it can provoke a powerful response in the viewer……”
Honestly, I don’t remember what I said after that. It must have been humorous because everyone was laughing. Reductio ad absurdum — literally reducing the situation to the absurd. It works quite well when it comes to diffusing an awkward situation, especially if one can make the situation humorous.
But a week has passed and I am still trapped in that conversation.
I have never thought of my work as provocative. Intentionally poking the viewer to elicit a reaction. I have never thought of my work as disturbing, well, with the exception of no more than a handful of images. I had never thought of my work as divisive or alienating. I see only the profound beauty.
And yes, I see the beauty in the sadness.
But, isn’t sadness beautiful?
Perhaps that was the problem for Olivier. He hasn’t seen the beauty in sadness. Or, is it my problem because I do?
I tried to tell Olivier that there is something, well, superficial, about people smiling. We all know how to do it and we have rehearsed the “cheesecake smile,” as I like to call it, from before we can sit up. I find it…….superficial. Empty. Evasive. A lie. It is rather like the way we respond to the question, “How are you?” We always answer “Fine, thank you.” Or something like that. And even if you don’t respond that way, no one seems to ever listen to how you do. Perchance they do, they quickly become uncomfortable. They don’t know how to respond. Or, perhaps, responding requires a measure of honesty about themselves, their lives, at which they are unwilling to look. Perhaps.
I can’t say for sure. It isn’t like I can do an empirical study on the subject either. “Question One: When someone tells you how they are really feeling when you ask ‘How are you?” do you feel: (a) awkward because you don’t want to think about what you are really feeling (b) angry because he or she has been honest……..’”
Pascal, in “The Pastoral Letters,” once wrote that humans long to be happy and the only way we can be happy given the fact that we all die is to fool ourselves into thinking we live forever. Perhaps, it is that sadness reminds us that we do not. Perhaps it is that sadness forces us to look at what we are really feeling beneath the thin veil of happiness. Perhaps sadness moves us to consider stepping away from the vanilla sameness of our lives. Perhaps it is sadness that reminds us that the only truth is ultimately our mortality and that all the “Truths” we manufacture pale in the end in the face of death.
Perhaps it is that sadness would move us — as Heidegger once said — to stand open and stand in the world — responsible for the creation of our own lives and destiny — as we are propelled towards our own mortality. Perhaps it is sadness that would press our faces against the fact that love pains us, and that we long to love and be loved even in the face of the limits death places on our ability to love. Perhaps.
In The House of NyghtFalcon, we talk about the creation of art requiring vulnerability, openness and honesty. This is the only way to reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary. It is the only way to create art.
But this is a two-edged sword for it requires both the artist and the viewer to engage in that moment of open and honest vulnerability. When the viewer refuses to engage in that dialogue, the work of art becomes provocative, disturbing, discomforting……….
Only two works of art of ever disturbed me. The one, Guernica. The other, The Scream. I was perhaps six or seven when I first viewed Guernica. It was so disturbing I had to turn my face away from the horror I felt. The sense of desperation in The Scream, which I also viewed for the first time when I was seven or eight perhaps, so profoundly disturbed me, its sense of mad desperation so profoundly horrified me, that I could not view it again for close to a decade. The idea that my work could be placed in the same genre as these two, well, I cannot find the words.
I have always found beauty in sadness.
I have always found sadness in beauty.
This I have always known to be true. I am acutely aware of the passage of time. I have always been. Long ago, just after my son was born, I came home one nyght rather late. I was working three jobs while a student at Yale. I remember walking into the bedroom and seeing in JD’s mother’s hair, a single strand of gray hair that belied her youth. In less than the time it took me to force myself to take another breath, I saw her grow old and die. So painful was this moment that for thirteen years I did not write another poem. The only way I could resist the pain was to murder my emotions. And so for each day of those thirteen years, I felt nothing. Surely, my work does not evoke such pain in those who see it….. Pain so severe, pain so eviscerating, pain so profoundly debilitating that he or she must look away, look away as I did when I looked upon Guernica or The Scream.
When I look at the beauty of a rose, I can feel it dying before my eyes — so profound is my awareness of time. When I look at isis or Innana, women I have worked with often, I can sense their “aging”. I can feel them succumbing to time. Each mark of time upon their faces moves me, haunts me, calls to me to be present in the moment with them, to hold what cannot be held, to deny time its vengeance upon them. It is here that I find sadness. It is here that I find beauty.
In the decade before his death, Albert Camus wrote a number of plays. One, called “Caligula”, always stood out amongst the rest for me. Camus’ interpretation of Caligula and his murderous activities is unique. Camus’ Caligula isn’t a mad man driven to murder because of some twisted psychological defect. His need to murder those he loves goes far deeper than that. In the final scene of the play, just before he is killed, Caligula is asked why he murdered those he loved. He replies:
“Most people imagine that a man suffers because out of the blue death snatches away the woman he loves. But his real suffering is less futile, it comes from the discovery that grief, too, cannot last. Even grief is vanity.”
To keep the grief alive, Caligula must murder over and over again.
To keep the sadness alive and so to breathe life into beauty, I must create. Incessantly. Endlessly. To keep the sadness alive. To nurture and sustain the beauty. To rebel, as Camus would say, against the silence of the universe. To assert love, and hope, and beauty, amidst a world in which all things and all emotions die. It is how we fashion our humanity in our rebellion against death, silence, meaninglessness, knowing all the while that death murders even our rebellion and steals our humanity. Because time even steals our grief. The only way to hold on to the moment is to cherish it, worship it, create within it, and, finally, to mourn each moment, until I am no more. As Camus’ Caligula murdered, I create because for me, if I do not create, I cannot hold the moment, I cannot rebel against death, I cannot feel the pain of beauty passing…….
