3 September 2008

the marble faun

I could not resist. Even tho it’s rainy and gray, and I feel hungover from traveling, I had to get out into the City today. What was to be a little exploration became a three-hour walk, with a stop at the Musée d’Orsay for a damn good reason: Calotypes.

One of the questions I’m asking myself on this, um, sabbatical is, “Why Photography?” My old line was that I worked backwards through Photo History in order to learn how to draw again. Photography was born from drawing, in part from one artist’s frustrations and a wish that Nature would draw itself. For years now I have been asking myself how to combine Drawing and Photography. Can I make Drawings about Photography? Why not just make drawings and escape the Camera completely?

And here, the City lets me know it’s listening… on one side of town, my deepest inspiration: early paper photography at the Musée d’Orsay ; on the other side: a full show at the Pompidou of my recent discovery, Miroslav Tichy. These could represent two sides of Photography (the process and the camera) at their most stripped-down state, exactly the way I love them. This, of course, is just what I’d be jettisoning simply to draw. A wonder indeed that both shows just happen to be up right now…

I actually walked by the Pompidou on my long promenade to the d’Orsay, stopping in the Tuileries for a while, and passing by the Louvre. I was rather tired by the time I made it to the Museum, but excited to see two exhibitions of Calotypes. Unfortunately, I had somehow googled my way to a lie, which promised me French Calotypes (including my dear Bayard!) alongside the British ones, but it just wasn’t true. The d’Orsay did, however, have a great show of French Daguerreotypes, making the disparities between Photography’s Twin Parents perfectly evident – The Grand Grainy Tour of the more transportable (and reproducible) Paper versus the more Perfect Shine of the Mirror. The one is full of ruins and vistas, the other of cities and faces. Country Mouse and City Mouse…

The Dags had some great little surprises, but it was more as objects than as images that I loved them. There were so many in the small red rooms, and I couldn’t really concentrate. (This may have been in part due to the Bulge of Teenagers bunching around the few nudes…) Either I was more jet-lagged than I realized, or I guess I had really just come for the paper.

Now, I had seen the British Calotypes at the Met last year, but it sure seemed a different show here, with a few things I hadn’t seen before. It was interesting to note that my two favorites from the Met exhibition sat at either side of the entry text… The d’Orsay has good taste! At any rate, even here my tired brain could only fixate on small details – hidden figures, collection-stamps impressed into bare skies, the hand-written captions, the varying contrast and color of les epreuves salées… Afterwards, I sat for a good long time in the great hall, gazing absently over a Satyr’s Butt. There are little magicks in those early pictures I don’t feel ready to give up yet, but it’s hard to imagine how to move forward when I’m mostly looking back. I have no answers yet, and the Faun has turned to stone.