Quintessential

Roger Fenton is immediately known for his Crimean photographs, for the way in which he conjures up a private world, rendering it familiar and warm, so that one almost forgets the harshness of war itself. But I like best his attempt to capture and freeze time itself, in some of his landscape photos. In some we see people caught in the light of a doorway, or small children climbing a fence, oblivious of the gazing world. All that transitoriness is played out against the solid bulwark of the masonry of Churches, abbeys. It is as if a meditation on the most fragile could only be possible against the backdrop of what is most permanent: time-worn stones and faith. Against this relief it appears that life is always slipping away, always in danger of falling back into the inorganic, of disappearing around the corner, retreating to the shadows-like so many of the subjects of the pictures themselves. Out of sight, out of mind. Even the huge, solid edifice of history and memory that we erect around us may not be enough to hold back time. Perhaps Fenton is saying that given this inevitability there is nothing else to do but portray something of our ineradicable ephemerality. Even the stone sculptures are composed with their shadows in close attendance-their alter egos. The dark knives that cut into our being are really just death-masks that carry our imprint with them. The wilderness photographs. Always a solitary individual surrounded by the emptiness of nature. The foreground-a river, a stream-is slowed down by the exposure of the camera revealing a stillness and an elemental simplicity that doesn’t seem to beout of place or artificial. On the contrary, it appears that this is the essenceof its real nature; that at the heart of all this rushing and striving for definition there is a contemplative nullity that embraces everything in its totality. In a few it is the sky that is slowed down in this way. Reduced to a white, blank canvas so that the landscape below is a fundamental land, a primordial place, once again. The land in these photographs is barely anything more than a contour, a cold unredeemed place. We are back to the Old Testament, to the heath that is only briefly lit up by the starlight. This is the world of of pure potentiality, the pre-formed garden before Adam has named anything. One can imagine how alluring such a picture would be to a world-weary generation, one that was questioning the infinite advance into thefuture, the sunlight. Perhaps there were other truths to stumble on, other realities that had to be erased before the earth would be forced to yield her secrets to science and technology.