Lieber Paul,

ich mag die billigen Jerry-Cotton-Heftchen aus den 60ern. Da wird noch anständig geraucht und Whiskey gekippt – und da werden Fotos noch ganz genau unter die Lupe genommen. Ein Umstand, den ich heute oft schmerzlich vermisse, vor allem bei mir bekannten Kuratorinnen und Kuratoren. Kürzlich sagte mir eine Kuratorin am Telefon, dass sich seit der Digitalisierung der Fotografie eine solche Fragestellung wohl erübrigt habe; dabei hatte ich sie nur gefragt, inwiefern, würde man ein Negativ verkehrt in die Bühne des Vergrößerungsgerätes einlegen, ein derart belichtetes Positiv noch der darauf abgebildeten Wirklichkeit entspräche? Ein solches Positiv, so meine Annahme, sei doch identisch mit dem seitenverkehrten Bild auf der Mattscheibe einer Kamera und entspräche – da die Weltkoordinaten bereits in Kamerakoordinaten übersetzt vorlägen – mehr dem Blick des Fotografen auf ein (Ab-)Bild der Welt als der Welt an sich. Ja, wollte ich weiter ausführen, unser Blick auf unser Spiegelbild sei doch gleichermaßen eine erste Abstraktion von Wirklichkeit; wir bräuchten sogar den Blick über zwei Spiegel, um uns so zu sehen wie die Welt uns sieht. Doch dazu kam ich nicht, da sich sowohl die Fragestellung, so die Kuratorin, wie auch eine Antwort im Zuge der Digitalisierung erübrigt hätten. Dabei scheint mir die Spiegelbildlichkeit (oder Händigkeit) nach wie vor eine der substantiellsten fotografischen Fragen zu sein. Nicht nur für den linkshändigen Mörder bei Jerry Cotton, der – hätte ein schussliger Polizeilaborant den Film falsch herum eingelegt – als fotografisch bewiesener Rechtshänder dem elektrischen Stuhl wohl entgangen wäre, wenn nicht ein findiger G-man in der rechten unteren Ecke eine Autonummer und im Hintergrund eine Schaufenster­beschriftung entdeckt hätte, beide unleserlich, weil seitenverkehrt bzw. horizontal gespiegelt, aber trotzdem noch wahrheitsgetreu und unverzerrt dem Abgebildeten verpflichtet wie ein Druck dem (ebenfalls seitenverkehrten) Druckstock. Aber eben: unleserlich. Denn Schriftzeichen, und mit ihnen alle Zeichen, werden gespiegelt zu etwas ANDEREM (ausgenommen die symmetrischen wie die 8, die Großbuchstaben H, W, I oder ein stilisierter Adler auf einer Wappenscheibe), was ja den hinlänglich bekannten Unterschied zwischen Abbild und Zeichen ausmacht. Das kleine Wörtchen PIPIFAX mag dies illustrieren: Ursprünglich verwendeten die Juden den Gottesnamen YHWH (Jahwe) auch in griechischen Bibelübersetzungen. Es wurde festgelegt, dass die hebräische Schreibweise des so genannten Tetragrammatons exakt beibehalten werden soll. Es schrieb sich von rechts nach links. Die Schreibweise der Griechen war jedoch von links nach rechts, YHWH lasen die Griechen deshalb als HWHY. Die vier hebräischen Schriftzeichen ähnelten den griechischen und lasen sich für Griechen wie PIPI. Bei einer Lesung des Bibelfaksimile fragten die Griechen, was denn PIPI in dem Fax (für Faksimile) bedeuten soll. Es war für sie unverständlich, und deswegen sprachen Leser der Abschriften von einem PIPI-Fax. In der heutigen Umgangssprache bedeutet PIPIFAX soviel wie Unsinn, Kleinigkeit, Mist. Im Spiegelbild hat der Name Gottes also die Bedeutung Unsinn, Kleinigkeit, Mist – kurz, das Zeichen stimmt offensichtlich nicht mehr mit dem Bezeichneten überein. Doch zurück zur Fotografie: Wenn wir die fotografische Aufnahme eines Hauses horizontal spiegeln würden, bliebe alles gleich und doch nicht gleich. Was oben ist, bleibt oben, das Dach wäre am Ort, die Türe auch, die Fenster, der Kamin am rechten Platz; und doch wäre alles verkehrt, seitenverkehrt. Die Bedeutung jedoch änderte sich nicht: das Haus bleibt das Haus bleibt das Haus. Ein Betrachter müsste, sofern er den Ort und das Haus nicht aus eigener Anschauung kennen und erinnern würde, davon ausgehen, dass alles seine Ordnung hat. Aber nun hängen wir in Gedanken ein Schild ans Haus mit einer Aufschrift, sagen wir: JERRY COTTON. Auf dem gespiegelten Bild wäre nun NOTTOC YRREJ zu lesen, was zwar nichts bedeutet, aber für jeden des Lesens und Schreibens fähigen Betrachter Indiz genug wäre, dass etwas...

Dear Paul,

Cogito ergo sum was yesterday. I know better today. Up to now I had been convinced of being less amenable to influence and ­blessed with more of a rational mind (blessed would arguably be the wrong word here), but yesterday I was in the Nationalgalerie, and in a trance as well, as the exhibition on The Better Self offered a hypnosis séance every hour on the hour. While the participants dropped off in their beanbags, a female voice intoned monotonous phrases to weave an opening to the subconscious, into which we descended in ten halting steps. You know me—it’s hard for me to let go of my critical understanding, but in the context of an art exhibition I let it happen, shut my eyes and gave myself up to the retinal spectacle produced by my bored visual nerves. Perhaps you remember the passage from Friedrich Engel’s Dialectic of Nature in which, with biting irony, he uses the example of the famous botanist and zoologist Alfred Russel Wallace to knock the brainlessness and gullibility of English scientists? Wallace believed he could prove the validity of Gall’s skull map with the aid of hypnosis, then still called mesmerism. This doctrine, which was developed in the late eighteenth century by Franz Joseph Gall, was supposed to allow conclusions to be drawn about the emotion and mental qualities of a person from the structure of his or her skull. In his endeavor to infer interior from exterior, Gall was incidentally a worthy successor to Johann Caspar Lavater, whose physiognomy, although heavily criticized at the time, was so popular in the eighteenth century that it became fashionable in society to draw silhouettes of one’s guests and read their characters from them. Thanks to their abstraction, both Lavater’s shades and Gall’s skull map offered simple solutions to an increasingly ­complicated world; they were something like facial-recognition algorithms avant la lettre, and not least contributed to the pseudoscientific underpinning of the National Socialists’ racial theories. Be that as it may, in order to shore up his theories our Dr. Gall collected and measured a large number of skulls, “mostly of madmen and criminals,” but also of important personalities of his time. In the name of self-knowledge Gall’s followers subsequently plundered innumerable graves, resulting in the disappearance of the skulls of Joseph Haydn, Gaetano Donizetti, and Rene Descartes—not without irony in the case of the latter, whose famous dictum was “larvatus prodeo” (I go forth masked). This is the going forth of one’s own silhouette. This is disguise. By the way, the above-mentioned Alfred Russel Wallace developed his own ideas on evolution parallel to Charles Darwin. Among other things he described the phenomenon of aposemantism, or warning coloration—that is, the opposite of disguise—as the result of the natural selection of species. In this way a poisonous frog signals its inedibility to its predators through striking coloration. Rapt on the beanbag of my unconscious, I allowed myself the heretical question of whether the individual that changes its color as a result of mutation doesn’t run a higher risk of being discovered and eaten? Add to this the fact that the predator would also die of the poison, and neither of the two would be able to pass on this vital information to their offspring? Perhaps Franz Joseph Gall’s idea of measuring the skulls of the dead and scanning them for information wasn’t such a bad one? Perhaps Wallace was plagued by the same doubts? Which drove him, as Friedrich Engels smirks, “to a series of self-deceptions, by virtue of which he confirmed Gall’s skull map in all its details”?...

Dear Paul,

Four in the morning, somewhere top right of Wichita, no way I can sleep. The car park in front of the motel holds a dark-blue blackness. On the veranda the ice machine starts up the compressor now and then, only to conk out again, while over by the silos a cold wind absorbs the wailing horns of passing freight trains. They have names like Prime Horn, Nathan K5LA, or Leslie RS5T, and are offered as kits on the Internet, with air pumps and everything else you need—pure nostalgia. If I were an artist, I would think up an installation with Airchimes, and a lot of blue, the color of the horizon, the color of loneliness, of longing, of desire, or in the words of Rebecca Solnit: “the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not.” Blues. In the bathroom of my parents’ house there was a window that opened onto a blue mountain range on the horizon. As a child I often sat on the toilet bowl and screwed up one eye, so as to align the ridge and a conspicuous flyspeck on the dirty window pane and with the other. If I tilted my head to the left and right, up or down, the flyspeck followed the line of the horizon. A small change of position, of perspective—even if due to boredom—causes desire and longing to become intrinsic rather than fulfilled. This crossed my mind yesterday, when I made the acquaintance of a old rancher who reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think who. He told me how as a young man he had given himself the task—which, as he credibly assured me, he mastered with bravura—of laying barbed-wire fences in perfectly straight lines through the Great Plains. To this end, said the man, he used a home-made device, his own invention, which, in response to my disbelieving astonishment, he laboriously explained with the aid of sketches: a moveable metal bar, not dissimilar to a pantograph, is strapped to a vertical pole, which usually marks the beginning of the fence; screwed onto its end is a telescope, which thanks to the parallel kinematical structure of the bar can be shifted left or right of the pole at will, without losing its precise alignment. Looking through the telescope, the man explained, he was now capable of monitoring the line of posts disappearing into the prairie, while being able to give his workers continual instructions via a telephone that used the barbed wire as a leased line, until they eventually reached the horizon. Only then, said the man, was his device set up again on the new horizon. I didn’t believe a word he said. After we said goodbye it finally occurred to me who the man reminded me of: the scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz.
 
Yours,
Trmasan

P.S. Have I already written to you that sad people can’t distinguish between blue tones as well as happy folk?

Dear Paul,

Shortly after your hasty departure from Warsaw I took a moment to look at the DVD you left behind—I assume on purpose. But why Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings, from 2014? You will have had your reasons, and you’ll have to take responsibility for them. Because when the first plague broke out over Memphis in full digital force after a mainly indifferent first hour, there was a knock at the door. It was the young German photographer from the opening the day before—I had suppressed the encounter and forgotten the appointment—accompanied by his Polish girlfriend and his portfolio. He wore a béret and a beard and seemed ambitious in a self-satisfied sort of way. He was working, he said, on a big thing; it would be “wielki,” he added coyly in Polish. He wants to portray the most important Polish artists—musicians, painters, authors, photographers, and of course filmmakers—and then “immortalize” them, as he put it, in gum bichromate prints. Without boring you with technical details, you need to know that gum bichromate was the preferred method of the pictorialists at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, a process that contrary to the classical silver photograph is exceptionally stable, but also exceptionally pretentious. With the gum bichromate the photographer turns himself into the painter of eternity. My objection was that impermanence appertains to the genesis of photography, that the light that draws the image and makes it visible should sooner or later be permitted to erase it, indeed must. Although the quiet rotting of the photographic paper, of the plates and films in the archives, is only a gentle echo of the decaying of their Barthesian referents; and had he seen Nicéphore Nièpce’s Point de vue du Gras in the original? which (unlike the familiar reproduction authorized by Gernsheim) barely shows a trace of the light that fell on a tin plate covered with bitumen of Judea—a light-sensitive bitumen, by the way, that has been extracted from the Dead Sea from time immemorial. I asked him if he knew that the Persian word for bitumen was “mumia” and gave the name for what we understand as mummification in ancient Egypt: artificial or natural circumstances prevent the process of decay at the cost of permanent physical presence, which only manifests permanent mental absence. In short, I said, gum bichromate prints are the mummies of photography! In retrospect that was the point at which his Polish girlfriend started making moves to leave. When the two rather indignantly departed, without our having looked at or discussed a single picture, I felt tired, depleted, and surrendered once again to the plagues over Memphis. I slept through the flight of the Israelites, and was only woken by the frenzied deluge of the showdown—not much of a sublime awakening. Do you know what I really miss in this film? The scene that every Bible film has to have, because of its unbelievable mythological power: Exodus, chapter 2, verses 1–10, the one with baby Moses cast upon the Nile in a “reed casket,” as Luther has it, daubed by his mother “with bitumen [really!] and pitch” to make it waterproof—or even lightproof? Was the casket a camera? Was Moses a film? A false conclusion, to be sure, but a fine one!

Yours,
Trmasan