S a c k s
T h i r t e e n P h o t o g r a p h s b y M i c h e l e A l a s s i o
BugnoArtGallery – Venice – 13th December 2002 – 5th January 2003
I n t r o d u c t i o n
Those who create images have always used forms that are able to express values beyond their mere appearance. The visual arts do not have the immediacy of music; each image is an interpretation of reality and not a reality in itself.
I believe that this unconscious awareness has prevented me, to this day, from portraying living beings. In order to consider people as an expressive means I have had to draw on my experience as a patient and on the work of Oliver Sacks as a stimulus to create images to express that which has been hopelessly imageless. To portrait desperation, joy, the stillness and fury of the human or inanimate being by taking a photograph is easy. But what the lens gives you is only a voiceless, two-dimensional shape momentarily containing these feelings. Between the original emotion and its icon there is always an unbridgeable gap filled with all the truth of life, that which separates text from representation, original from copy, my stretched out hand from its x-ray.
My interest in neurology and neuropsychiatry dates from 1995 when I had my first attack of “Cluster headache”. Let me explain – not because I want to write my autobiography but because it was in the void of my pain, in its desperate absence of images that I came to rethink my entire way of seeing photography and to conceive this work.
The cluster headache is the most intense form of pain a man can bear, and is also known as “Suicide headache” because of the high percentage of people who have chosen the quickest possible remedy. It appears suddenly on one side of the head with pains lasting from two to four hours from one to ten times a day. The “illness” evolves over a cycle of a few months then suddenly disappears, and can come back again even after years.
Pain is difficult to describe. Because this is an indescribable pain it is completely inappropriate to search for a metaphor in our everyday life; a fracture, a cut or a tumour cannot give the idea, perhaps only emotional comparison can convey the idea. Let us say that each attack is like seeing your son raped before your eyes while you are tied to a chair, and not only, afterwards you cannot remember what has happened but it is repeated five or six times a day with the same unbearable intensity.
The physical pain is limitless, but not only, it can be neither embraced, shared nor possessed, it is a pain that drains you while leaving you physically intact: you do not have one leg shorter than the other, or diabetes or some other pathology that you can learn to live with, what you have is a monster that grabs hold of you when it chooses, that torments your flesh and only stops a moment before killing you.
It has been the invisibility of my pain that has led me to other pains, that has convinced me that only that which has no image is worthy of possessing one and that trying to give a form to feelings like these is the aim of my photography.
Photography has always been the centre of my life, it is the way I earn a living and the means I use to express my feelings whether it is love for my city or personal feelings and experiences. In spite of this I have always detested the common attitude that is taken towards photography, the use that has been made of it and at the same time I have longed for a future that I know photography could have.
I have always loved those first photographs of deserted Parisian Boulevards that thanks to the long exposure time necessary are populated by ectoplasms, ghosts of passers-by, carriages and pigeons. Even after years what would remain of a shot from the same angle would only be that which has come down through time: the photographer’s intention, everything which is not human.
I’ve always felt that the reliability of photography, its claim to preserve and construct memory, has been a limit rather than an attribute. I have no love of the present, it is a short lived place where each moment passing becomes the past, jotted down with the depth of animal reflex. We are now sure that memory is not that limitless bourgeois library we house in our brain. Each fact of our lives is nothing but a base icon furbished with meaningful phrases and sentiments when illuminated with memory, and this recall is as reliable as our feelings and momentary desires.
There is no room for truth and feelings in our brain and perhaps our brain contains nothing but itself and contemplates nothing but its own existence: life flows there but like the road under the wheel of a motorcycle it never stops, like water under a keel.
But if memory means building, if memory means reproducing, then there is no truth to be found in the past nor in its images, because it is only an instant of our humanity that prevails. Photography was imposed as a media by our natural predisposition for surrender and simplification. To be possessed by an idea or desire through an image is an irresistible temptation because it offers a form of pseudo-knowledge, an acquittal, apparently without consequences whereas, in actual fact, photography has drowned the world with so many useless superficial images that the whole world has become landscape after landscape, nude after nude, corpse after corpse, each one as useless as it is superficial.
Only photography could succeed in emptying our world of content and feelings while claiming to portray it at the cost of the passion and depth spent in a sixtieth of a second. This is because only photography has been instinctively conferred with an objective dimension which it cannot really possess neither as an icon nor as a language; within the grip of these two dimensions it is an container lacking in depth and because, luckily, the language of irreflection does not exist.
This congenital incontinence and inability of the photograph to withhold sentiment, this immediate loss of effectiveness has led to images that have been harder and harder, always more shocking, a desperate attempt to hit harder and leave a mark. But it has been like trying to drive a nail into a wall with a rubber mallet because it is not the strength but the means used that is not suitable and it is the aim, the usage that is improper
Photographs are isolated flashes. Each one should be followed by darkness, like in nature or the uncertainty of memories. They cannot contain the complexity of either the world or our feelings because in photography everything is included in a context that ends up having the same importance. To retrace a feeling in a photograph means that that feeling and only that feeling is portrayed there. This way the photo adheres to the essentiality of the feeling by means of an intensity that overwhelms the subject and envelopes it just like the brain when retaining only the essential traits of a feeling. Feeling is not found within things, no more than love is found within the form of the loved one.
These observations have conditioned my entire photography. It is why I have never photographed livings beings, nor created “series” of images on the same subject. I believe there is always only one possibility of capturing the feeling of a place and this is the only image that has the right to exist.
You should only shoot when you “feel it” and limit yourself to that single shot, not rely on the simplicity of the means and take endless shots and then later sift through the results in search of fortune’s child.
These are the premises with which I have approached this work based on Sacks, for this reason I have searched and photographed for seven years. I have illuded and disilluded myself printing and discarding hundreds of images but I believe that these premises have been respected to the core in these twelve works.
Oliver Sacks divides the neurological pathologies described in his stories into two apparently opposite categories: deficit and excess. Deficit is the lack of functionality of a part of our intellectual or motorial heritage, excess as an uncontrollable hyperactivity of the same sensorial mechanisms. Deficit involves agnosia of any type and excess all those pathologies with incontinence.
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Michele Alassio
Settembre 2002
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