Conversing with a Photograph

Sunil Sharma

Photographs do the talking.

Provided you are listening.

Setu was trying that only---listening.

And invited the writing community to do the listening, and engage with the scene laid out as a film set, in a public place, for recreational purposes.

We sent a call for the month of September revolving around this stunning picture “Lone Seat-north Haven” taken by Robert Maddox-Harle, the iconic author-poet-editor-critic-sculptor-painter, from Lismore, Australia.

The call was titled: Constructing Conversations with a Picture.

Happy to say that the select writers featured in the special section came up with some cool stuff: their creative responses.

Talking of the picture, the famous photographer Rob---fondly called so by friends---says the underlying theme, the motivation of clicking a particular instant, mood, in frames for the benefit of the lovers of photography as an art form, in the following words:

“My intention with this photograph was to evoke a sense of absence – no boats, no cars, no people in the park, no person on the seat. The empty seat paradoxically suggests absence and presence. Who should be sitting on the seat looking at the peaceful, though empty, beautiful natural scene? The absence is haunting and palpable, the film (not digital) photograph adds to this feeling.”

This is the core of the message. The crux. The dialectics of being and non-being, of there-not-there, presence and absence, in the same frame or moment, caught on the lens forever: A brooding mood, bordering on the dark, in that milieu, stripped of humanity.

A Hamletian setting with an intense ominous music in the background---bleak, soulless, dangerous, gloomy, where things are not what they appear to be.

A noir venue.

Dystopic.

Or, a period of transition---evening turning into a night.

The picture can evoke lots of feelings, mixed or otherwise.

That is the power of photography as an art-form and visual narrative.

As Roland Barthes says famously “a photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.’’ The studium and punctum are equally interesting points of entry into a photograph, of reading it, according to the French philosopher and top-form semiotician.

Well, so what is important?
The intention of the photographer at the time of framing a given “reality”?

Or, the intention of the viewer at the time of viewing/ reading a visual?

Their immediate contexts, moods?
Certain lingering melancholy that tinges the viewing as an act of aesthetics?

As an act of reception of art as artifacts in mass culture?

Who creates the reality of a given object?

The lens of an artist or that of the spectator?

What exactly is reality?
Overdetermined by the intentionally---or its complete lack---of the creating artist?

Or, the search and choice of the spectator/reader of some elusive value that matches their mental and spiritual needs and expectations, the kind of anticipated equivalences that great art unleashes in the very act of reading or viewing, in the process of artistic consumption?

Equivalences of artistic intentionality, mood with that of the viewer.

Well, these are the questions better left to the theoreticians and philosophers.

Or, to Robert Maddox-Harle to answer.

Meanwhile, enjoy the September edition with some other interesting content.

Thanks for stopping by.

Thanks to all the contributors.

Enjoy life as it comes!

Sunil Sharma,

Managing Editor

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Setu, September 2024