The first time I
look at Beata Długosz’s photographs, I can see the Moon. Only
after a while what seemed to be the spots on the surface of the Moon,
begins to constitute specific forms. I’m beginning to recognise the
shapes of houses, plants, streets and a wall with towers, women in
their shawls. Then the nature of those associations changes. I am
recalling the first seconds in a camera
obscura, when the shadows formed by a
light start to come out and become flesh. A round frame of the
photographs emphasises the sensation of looking into a distance
through a periscope or a telescope maybe. The author asks us to gaze
at those pictures – but what are they?
The “Moon” pictures
were created by placing a few photographic layers on themselves:
lines of squares and numbers show through the images of photographed
reality: in fact, they are forms from a paper protection of a
medium-format negative. The photographs seem to be overexposed.
Thanks to that, a watcher need to have a good look to discover what
is on a photograph. Those eight dark photographs were entitled “Echo”
by their author. They are accompanied by three photosensitive
pictures at the exhibition that are overexposed while in the gallery.
What is this exhibition
about? Is it about an image made of light and its changes in time?
About the impermanence of an image? About extracting pieces of once
remembered view out of memory? Or maybe about something else too?
I would like to propose
a different reading, originating from the initial mistake, when the
oval frame suggested the Moon to me. The important thing is what we
learn in school – that the Moon does not shine with its own light,
but with reflected one. It might seem to us that the light of the
Moon lightens our way, but it is merely a reflection. The Moon acts
like a mirror and carries the reflection of the sun into the night.
What does the author’s
mirror reflect? Before we answer that question, we should think about
the Moon for a while. It is changeable yet strangely regular, it
controls the complicated flows of water on Earth, it remains close to
the people. The anthropomorphised face of the Moon, like in a film by
Mélies, seems to be drifting in a distance – but a distance that
can be reached. Is it why a journey to the Moon has always been
humanity’s dream, from Cyrano de Bergerac to modern scientists? To
reach the Moon, to send a ship, to touch the surface of this silver
globe… For Italo Calvino, the Moon becomes a symbol of poetical
lightness – a symbol of breaking away from the Earth.
This Italian
investigator says: ‘Each time the Moon lands in the poems, it
always has the power to invoke the feeling of lightness and suspense,
a silent and soothing charm’1.
This particular celestial body that appears to us seems to be cut out
of cardboard. It is cool and it brings anxiety, despite bringing hope
as well by lightening the shadows of the night (you can recognise the
shapes in its light). Another world is awaken in the light of the
Moon, a subterranean, dreamy world. The lightness and suspense that
Calvino talks about, is possible either in a state of weightlessness
or a dream, when we lose control over our bodies. Calvino repeats
after Leopardi:
‘The expanse becomes
matt,
The azure becomes navy
blue, the shadows are rising
Over the roofs and the
hills,
Accompanied by the silver
of a silently risen Moon’.
The words of
Italian poet create an image similar to the photographs of Beata
Długosz, as there is more shadow in them that light. We can see a
group of people standing on a hill on one of the photographs. A few
women in shawls, a man. They are not looking at us, they are turning
towards the horizon. A desert city is at their feet. On another
photograph there are white branches of a tree, or maybe a bush, in
the foreground. A dark outline of a fortress in the back. The forms
are as we sometimes see them during an evening stroll, when the
colours of the day are replaced by black and grey shades of the
night.
So maybe the author is
showing us her dreams in this cycle? Dreams with the shadows of
daylight events, memories of an outlived world, that are now reformed
into a new, subconscious whole, seem fantastic and realistic at the
same time? It is said that a photograph shows the past. But what is
the past, one might ask? It is the pieces of images recorded in our
memories, pieces of reality on negatives. After-views of the world,
only seen through our clenched eyelids. The echo is a sound
equivalent of a visual after-view – it is a sound heard when it is
no longer produced. A photograph is an echo of the past, a shadow of
the world visible when it is no more. This sensation is intensified
with the materiality of the three photographs gradually darkening in
the gallery. For a moment, for a day or a month the view on those
photographs will not be visible anymore, but it will still exist in
an invisible structure of the photosensitive emulsion – like a
mirror reflecting the dark side of the Moon.
Poznań, 28 May 2013
Marianna Michałowska
