Everything plunges into a world with no shore, a world that defies any definition and in the face of which, as so many have already said, any affirmation is a loneliness, an island.
H.G. Adler, A Journey
Copenhagen, November 2014
They are standing in front of a dark shape: an immense fallen balloon, as still as an animal washed ashore. There is, in the taut fabric, a breath of wind to be felt, as if some enormous mouth were still inflating it. One of them makes as if to move, the other is motionless, already. They were in mid-air and now here they are, contemplating the inert mass of their dream.
The image bears all the uncanniness of those early days of photography, of the first portraits of strangers and spectres. It is riddled with a multitude of insect-like dark flecks. Its surface is velvet grey, glimmering with the vague reflections left behind by the light, smooth as cloth, deep as the sea, a scattering of abstract constellations, markings, sooty crackling, edges leaking like ink, traces of too powerful a light that obliterates the landscape, or vapour that dissipates every nuance of black.
If you look past these blemishes, if you try to lift them like a veil, what remains, next to the mass of the balloon, black on white, are two silhouettes, dangling in the void as if by an invisible hand. You can only tell where the ground stops, where the sky starts, by the position of their feet. Without those figures, you might just be looking at an icy cliff or a sugar lump held between two fingers.
They are standing in front of a dark shape: an immense fallen balloon, as still as an animal washed ashore.
There is nothing to indicate their sex, their age, only what we have all understood since childhood to represent a human shape: two arms, two legs, a blockish torso, a small head. And yet quickly we sense they are men – is it because of the weapons, black dashes at their belts? Or because at the turn of the twentieth century there were so few women photographed anywhere except in front of a painted backdrop or salon wall-hanging? If there are two of them in that image, there must be a third holding the camera, another man, invisible, to whom we owe the photograph.
It stands out, among others, at Copenhagen’s Louisiana Museum – an elegant, white structure, colonnades and terraces reminiscent of the state of Louisiana which, you might guess, has lent this place its name when in fact it was named after the three successive wives of its founder, all called Louise, and all of whom you can easily imagine strolling one after the other across the luscious lawns that tumble down to the Baltic.
Across the water is Sweden. On a fine day, you can just make out the coastline.
Sometimes we stop. To look.
Sometimes, an image breaches the unspoken agreement entered into with all the others – that we see them as surfaces, as memories, that we accept that what we are looking at only exists now behind a frame of glass or paper. Every now and then, one of them makes us pause. Our eyes are used to taking in everything without seizing on anything; this eases their task, allows them to rest. Sometimes we stop. To look.
And then the vast rooms of the museum release the space hinted at by the photograph, the growl of the sea intrudes more and more, bringing with it fragments of a northern land that is as unknown as it is familiar, of some white void that might be carried like an island within us all. There might be a lake, a glacier, fir trees and reindeer, then fewer and fewer trees, nothing but the cold and the light.
Things have changed scale; the image now takes over the room. The beginnings of a story seem to be hidden within it, something spills out from it, something unfinished, the outline of narratives to be rewritten, working backwards, since the image has just become the new point of departure.
The eye is a photographic plate which is developed in the memory. There are other images to be found, somewhere there, between lens and imprint.
This is an extract from A World With No Shore by Hélène Gaudy, translated by Stephanie Smee and published by Black Inc. A World With No Shore is available now at your local independent bookseller.
