Criticism – Camera Obscura

Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes

Gonzalo Bénard — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 17:04:17 +0000

#1 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
Please visit Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes for the full size image.

To understand an artist’s work you can’t keep your eye stuck only on the image that’s worth a thousand words, and Camera Obscura gave me a click on this sentence, making me go deeper and beyond. A week ago I couldn’t avoid going to an exhibition held here in Paris, at the Centre Gulbenkian (French delegation of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon), and if you’re coming here, please do yourself a favour and go see it!

Gérard Castello-Lopes was born in Vichy in 1925, son of the cinema (his father, José Castello-Lopes, founder of Filmes Castello-Lopes) and music (his mother, Marie-Antoinette Lévéque, piano player), spending most of his life living in Lisbon – or between Lisbon and Paris -, being himself a disciple of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

#2 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
Please visit Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes for the full size image.

I knew his work since always – I guess that I have less years of life than he dedicated to photography – but always felt something was missing for me to understand his whole work. It can be understood perfectly well the influence of the music on his work, specially piano, as he was a great piano player and composer himself, and also co-founder of the Lisbon Hot Club, the Lisbon jazz spot. This, you will find on the lines and rhythms and compositions (photo #1).

#3 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
Please visit Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes for the full size image.

It can also be perfectly visible the influence he had from the cinema, in the use of light (also from Cartier-Bresson, using natural light), composition, stolen stills from a film. But still… there was something I didn’t know: his main passion and hobby and where it all began:

Water.

Under Water.

#4 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
Please visit Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes for the full size image.

Gérard Castello-Lopes was a passionate autonomous diver. From the Ocean to the sea, the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, where he learned how to dive (Cannes) or near Lisbon, where he lost his friend and diver colleague Philippe Cousteau. And it was when diving that he starts doing photography with his French Foca.

Suddenly it all made sense to me, so I went back to the exhibition’s rooms to review all his main work. It’s true that he had an amazing work of light, as I wrote before natural light taught by his (our) master Cartier-Bresson. Even though there’s a huge difference of lights as the light of Lisbon is much warmer than the light of Paris. I experienced that already in my own photographic work. However, Castello-Lopes’ light is different. It’s not the usual light of Lisbon or Paris. He, somehow, brings the underwater light to his photography giving to it a special mood very characteristic on his work. That was exactly the feeling I had when seeing his exhibited work: diving in submerged cities, where water isn’t an issue for us to breath.

#5 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
Please visit Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes for the full size image.

His view, or the view that he gives us is not only through his camera lenses but also through his diving armour’s glass, as if he had the gift of taking us to the place making us living and feeling it as he did.

There are photographs that you feel diving through submerged places, finding living humans there or just their presence even though being all them existing on the surface, and when on the earth’s surface feeling he brings water puddles (photos #2 and #3) or glass reflections, to give some water mood as well.

#6 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
Please visit Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes for the full size image.

Gérard Castello-Lopes started taking photography while diving, but soon he realised that was not so easy, also for the camera as it had immediately to go through several complicated processes of cleaning the camera even if he had a supposed waterproof metal case with flash, so his photographs really under water became more as a frustration to him.

On the photograph taken in Scotland, 1985, (photo #4) there are two kids throwing pieces of bread to flying seagulls, however, the image I “saw” was the 3 seagulls as swimming fishes reflected on sky. A play of sea and sky, as if the sky was showing the reflection of the sea and not the opposite, that he repeated in other photographs like the one he took in Chambord, France (photo #5), in 1984.

#7 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
Please visit Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes for the full size image.

Castello-Lopes projects this way his underwater world to ours.

He also brought kids diving, as I’m sure he saw them and projected them as so, even if they were just jumping and playing on any street (photos #6 and #7). They both appear to be diving and playing in deep ocean.

#8 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
Please visit Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes for the full size image.

Or the photograph with the 4 priests sit down on a bench talking (photo #8), like corals in a reef, with such aquatic and organic movement they have.

And the “mermaid” looking lost as any human-fish at “Dubonnet’s sea”, taken in Paris, in 1957 (photo #9).

#9 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
Please visit Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes for the full size image.

From the magnificent portrait of his mother taken in 1959 (photo #10), the piano player as a reflected bust lost and found next to a sank boat under the Mediterranean waters that he could have take while diving… to the photo he took already with his feet on earth, from above, watching the body submerged, in 1998, (photo #11) when it seems that he finally assumes he is out of his main element. He feels his feet on the ground now, after he got married and become a father of two. He explores earth.

#10 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
Please visit Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes for the full size image.

And here on earth, he shoots his photograph that I like the most, in Paris, 1985. (photo #12). Probably one of his most abstract images, inviting you to be there. In this one, if you’re a follower of the rules, you’ll be disappointed, as it seems that he broke them all. Even the basic rule of thirds. The main subject is on your left side. It reminds me another one, taken by Cindy Sherman, where there’s a lonely lady on the left, leaving the line-curve on the right so you can feel yourself there, or even a blank space for someone who’s yet to arrive.

#11 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
Please visit Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes for the full size image.

Some people can break all the rules: they are called masters.

Patterns were also something that attracted Castello-Lopes. But not to be repeated. They existed to be different, even if this can seem awkward or non-sense. He doesn’t photograph a pattern; he gives us the concept of patterns. Like they exist in nature, or the walls created by seaweeds creating patterns that don’t exist… as a pattern. But as a whole. So that’s what he also brought, shooting ropes left at the sand by fishermen, or even trails left by their boats, wheels and feet. Or coming out from the sea and sand, already at the urban landscape the scaffolding that is used to build, with men and by men. And with men, is also the iconic photograph of them all turned back, in line, bending, looking at the sea. In Algarve, 1957 (photo #13).

#12 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
Please visit Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes for the full size image.

His marriage with Daniéle and the birth of his two children (daughter and son), brought him out of water, giving him a new universe, even if he never stopped diving in his mind and way of seeing. He was living on earth.

He now enjoys another element: Fire. Finally. That he started discovering with his series of blood at the bullfights, and later on with his other colour series of the burning scare crows (1996) (photo #14).

#13 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
Please visit Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes for the full size image.

If there is a need to cut Gérard Castello-Lopes photographic chronology in 2 parts -due to his marriage and the birth of their 2 children-, there’s a first part where he never left the Water, even if using the Air element to reflect it, and the second part -after being married and becoming a father-, where he is connected with Earth. And finally Fire. Scaring the crows. Playing Jazz.

Visit Gérard Castello-Lopes (1925-2011) exposition Apparitions (photography 1956-2006) curated by Jorge Calado. Centre Gulbenkian, Paris from April 25th to October 25th 2012.

#14 © Gérard Castello-Lopes
Please visit Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes for the full size image.

Yangon fish market, by Paola Casali

Fabiano Busdraghi — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 22:19:44 +0000

Yangon fish market

On Camera Obscura pages, as in many interventions about photography spread around both the virtual and the real world, I insist on the fact that pictures don’t necessary have a mimetic relationship with reality. Being an icon is one of the possible characteristics of photography, but absolutely not the most fundamental and constitutive.

Although this, photography is often iconic, and that was the characteristic that initially attracted me, the first time that I took a camera in my hands to impress what surrounded me, without saying anything about symbols, icons and index. Despite all I learnt after that, the narrative possibilities of photography still live in me: showing an angle of a distant world, people, things, lost paradises. Therefore reportage, even though Camera Obscura mostly talks about fine art photography, is one of my biggest passion ever.

Detail of a man washing himself

Some years ago, while Paola Casali was showing some shots of her last travels, I saw a picture that suddenly brake my heart, taken at the Yangon fish market.

Apart from the love I feel towards distant travel, places and people’s pictures that I just talked about, this image always shocked me for its structure and visual content.

Generally I’m not so comfortable with the squared format. Even if many photographers love it, I feel like I’m missing some space or I have too much and I’d like to cut it away. I’m not surprised by the praise of the square by Michele Vacchiano:

As the streets of Turin or Trieste [the square] frightens people, in its geometrical predictability skims the territories of the insanity. It is a paradox, it terrifies. Inside the square there’s no direction, there’s no base or height, as each side is able to take both roles. In its formal ambiguity every kind of orientation gets lost, every kind of mental docking disappears. In the center of Turin (squared, regular, alien city for those who are not born into it) Nietzsche the philosopher got crazy.

Michele Vacchiano

For the same reason there are only few pictures that I love in this format and this is an amazing example. In this case the square is perfectly filled up and managed; the elements, even if heterogeneous and antithetic, seem to be assembled in a cyclic mode, as in the famous picture of Esher Ascending descending.

Detail of the man at the window

This is the characteristic that I mostly admire in this picture. It is an image that contains two completely different ones. It is an alive, dynamic, noisy and moved image of a man that is washing himself naked in the exact moment when he throws some water on himself from the basin. The other one is static, silent, and staid; the boy staring out the window with his flawless shirt, his arm leaning on the window sill. One with his eye opened and the other one is looking at the camera. One submerged by the blinding white light of the street, the other one has the black background of the house. One has a half grimace painted on his face, the other one something like a smile. The two elements of the picture are so heterogeneous, and beautiful, they could be two completely different and independent pictures. Those two elements are so into each other that they create a unique, equilibrated image.

Summing up, I’m reporting the words that Paola Casali would like her picture about the Yangon fish market would be accompanied by:

I came back from that trip and I started feeling ashamed for my way of life. There are places all around the world where people live with some rice per day, places where one rat can be a rich meal. We are free; over there, they do not now what freedom is. This is very sad.

Paola Casali

Mïrka and the insect, by Gilles Berquet

Fabiano Busdraghi — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 13:03:36 +0000

The pictures of Gilles Berquet are a trip into the obscure world of the eroticism, without forgetting sadomasochism, bondage, pissing, strange machines and perversions. In general, I do like all of them and I do not have any kind of prejudice or refusal towards porn pictures. I do appreciate those who explore their ghosts and their own perversions, offering them to the world. But the majority of his images, from the photographic point of view, don’t strike me in a particular manner. In some cases I can’t see further than a woman with her leg open and a jet of pee flying into the air.

One year ago anyway, I was looking at his portfolio in a gallery, amazing minuscule black and white prints, I’d say 6×10 cm or 10×15 cm maximum, on a big page. Traditional prints, fascinating me with their perfect analogical black and white, produced with mastery and some nostalgic and retro taste.

I particularly love little prints. Giant pictures are always of impact, but also the tiny ones, when presented on a big paper that gives air and space to the image, are amazing. The visual perception goes on another plan and you must near the image, to look at it close. It feels like you keep something precious between your hands, a little jewel. Technically, prints that haven’t been enlarged keep some of the beauty that contact prints have, that softness and richness of tones, little details that make antique pictures fascinating.

Between the images of Gilles Berquet portfolio, one suddenly stroke me for its elegant composition and the intensity of the model’s eye. It’s a picture without title of 2000 that represent Mïrka Lugosi, the lover and muse of Gilles Berquet, with a black bug on the hand.

I suddenly fell in love with the whiteness of her skin over a black and confused background, the hand in the foreground and the body almost out-of-focus, behind the black bug walking on the woman fingers, as dark as her black-painted nails. But most of all it is her face, her expression that make the shot intense and unforgettable. It is her bob haircut, her strong make-up, her black lips. Her wrinkles at the borders of her mouth, as she would be a witch, her cruel and angry look. Terrible, intense and upsetting. Absolute power of the darkness, a concert of malignity and perversion.

Ars moriendi, by Joel-Peter Witkin

Fabiano Busdraghi — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 21:27:10 +0000

It’s been some months since I started thinking about a new category of articles for Camera Obscura, something like “around a photograph”. A category with a series of articles, each one dedicated to an image, a particular picture, which came into my life and there it stayed, such a rock in the middle of a street. One of that pictures that astonishes, that leaves you dumbfounded. It could be love, repulsion, impression and envy, no matter what. They will be with me for the rest of my life, with their emotional and visual strength, never leaving me. I’m talking about rare images, pictures that become rarer and rarer the more boredom and knowledge pollute the astonishment on which we are looking at the world.

Some months ago I went visiting the gallery Baudoin-Lebon for the exhibition of Joel-Peter Witkin. Actually I already knew his work quite well, but I was always interdicted, as I didn’t know what to do. I’m fascinated, but I don’t know if the feeling is repulsion or love, or even both. I will not quote his images, which are famous, and I will not repeat the motivations behind his photography, the macabre biographical anecdotes that have been already largely discussed. I will focus on the picture: Ars Moriendi.

I fell in love at first sight. The cleanness of the composition, the antique and decadent languid pose, the macabre human corpses but most of all the strident counter position between the white body of the girl and the black heads of the corpses at her feet.

This is surely the first and strongest impression. The naked body is so plenty of life, so real that could come out of the picture, could be a girl leaning in front of you. Skin wrinkles, on the side, make her real beauty, every day beauty. Concrete beauty, not one of the doll we’re used to, a beauty with abounding breast, just falling, the young skin that will get old soon. An antique beauty, fleshy, rounded arms, large hips and thighs. Her whiteness of skin, the mortal pallor exalts her life murmur. This beauty watch us with sadness and melancholy, a young face that is starting fading, her eyes were tormented from who knows which kind of thin pain. White gloves, the mirror, the luxury of the gesture, of that hand with the feather underline the aristocratic nobility, the outmode decadence.

It could be an antique picture, a wonderful demoiselle fin de siècle, that could pose for a picture that is a hymn to beauty, to nakedness, to eroticism. If it wasn’t for the bodies lying at her feet. If it wasn’t for those old man heads, the face warped by death and putrefaction, the wide open dumb mouth with a few staggering teeth, the flaccid and falling skin, the sunken eyes, lock of hair pasted to skin with weird slurries.

The contrast is strong, but it’s contained in the image with extraordinary unity. The naked girl, with her long white feather, seems waving the decapitated bodies, as they would be idols to venerate, divinities to whom offer her life in sacrifice, as death would be the maximum authority to pay respect to. At the same time, the screaming and cut-off heads, at maiden’s feet, seem to venerate her life, they seem to sing a spring hymn, they look like a macabre offer to beauty and youth, they seem a crazy token of love, an extreme love.

Generally, in front of Wiktin images, mostly in still life (and this is absolutely still), composed with pieces of corpses, I never know if I’m stricken by a macabre curiosity. The possibility to finally see what society hides in every way, the real face of death, the putrefaction and the horror of time passing by closing the curtains of life. This surely happens with bodies photographed by Andres Serrano, who –even if I regard with esteem this artist for many other works- creates the 90% of his images satisfying this morbid curiosity. In the case of Witkin’s picture Ars Moriendi, I’d say that the presence of those horrifying heads is absolutely functional to the image.

I don’t want to find a rational message perforce, but in front of this image I’m dreadfully in the middle, it runs into me and I can’t go out uninjured. I can’t perceive this infinite mixture of life and death, beauty and horror, attraction and repulsion, eroticism and disgust. While I’m looking and looking again this terrible and magnificent image, I hear the echo of the poetry Une carogne, by Charles Baudelaire, that i post here in the article.

Poetry that says everything I haven’t said yet about this picture of Wiktin.

A carcass

Charles Baudelaire – Spleen et Idéal, XXIX

My love, do you recall the object which we saw,
That fair, sweet, summer morn!
At a turn in the path a foul carcass
On a gravel strewn bed,

Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,
Burning and dripping with poisons,
Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way
Its belly, swollen with gases.

The sun shone down upon that putrescence,
As if to roast it to a turn,
And to give back a hundredfold to great Nature
The elements she had combined;

And the sky was watching that superb cadaver
Blossom like a flower.
So frightful was the stench that you believed
You’d faint away upon the grass.

The blow-flies were buzzing round that putrid belly,
From which came forth black battalions
Of maggots, which oozed out like a heavy liquid
All along those living tatters.

All this was descending and rising like a wave,
Or poured out with a crackling sound;
One would have said the body, swollen with a vague breath,
Lived by multiplication.

And this world gave forth singular music,
Like running water or the wind,
Or the grain that winnowers with a rhythmic motion
Shake in their winnowing baskets.

The forms disappeared and were no more than a dream,
A sketch that slowly falls
Upon the forgotten canvas, that the artist
Completes from memory alone.

Crouched behind the boulders, an anxious dog
Watched us with angry eye,
Waiting for the moment to take back from the carcass
The morsel he had left.

— And yet you will be like this corruption,
Like this horrible infection,
Star of my eyes, sunlight of my being,
You, my angel and my passion!

Yes! thus will you be, queen of the Graces,
After the last sacraments,
When you go beneath grass and luxuriant flowers,
To molder among the bones of the dead.

Then, O my beauty! say to the worms who will
Devour you with kisses,
That I have kept the form and the divine essence
Of my decomposed love!

Criticism – Camera Obscura

Apparitions, photography by Gérard Castello-Lopes

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Yangon fish market, by Paola Casali

Mïrka and the insect, by Gilles Berquet

Ars moriendi, by Joel-Peter Witkin