For Starters
By Andrei Baciu
4 May 2008
Considering that one can elaborate on, say, the Pythagorean theorem without one having previously understood what the triangle really is represents, for any individual with a minimum logical coherence, an obvious mistake. Trying to study a certain aspect, no matter its type, but failing to grasp its basic principles, the ones that set it in motion, i.e. its very axioms, is equivalent to starting an unstoppable swirling around one's tail. And the more one is unaware of this unconscious exercice, the more treacherous it becomes.
I will, therefore, strive to begin thinking photography the way I must – with the beginning.
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The postmoderns (or should I say "this mad century" ?), I reckon, have an intrinsic repulsion towards axioms (and finding a good reson for this isn't that impossible with a little common sense). I prefer remaining how I have always been... stubborn, that is.
Art. The Art. What is it/ what is its goal ? For me, art is just like the Jacob's biblical ladder. One of its ends plunges into the mud of the immediate reality, material and subjected to the whims of chance, while the other vanishes into the heights of transcendence, or, more exactly, of the divinity. Bluntly said, the authentic condition of the human being isn't by any means the one of a beast – no matter how rational – whose life is limited only to what the physical eyes can perceive. Our present existence on earth is but an unhappy detour, merely an exile which we ourselves provoked. Each and everyone of us bears in his being a seed of divinity, that constantly calls and urges us to recall who we really are. And art represents a way of making this "anamnesis", as one of those dead Greek fellows used to say. I prefer " a way" because this isn't, however, the royal, ideal path – but the one of the saints. As for us, the ordinary people, all we can do is to "live within in the best way we can", as the Romanian author Marin Sorescu (another dead guy) once wrote. Cynical – and tepid – compromise.
Therefore, as any other art, photography too posseses the same initial data. What photography may be said to distinguish from the rest is the fact that it uses – or it is used by – a raw matter of the finest kind. While, say, Literature seeks, through words, The Word, Photography reveals the Light within the Light. Which I wish to us all.
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