STILL LIFE

Fényes Adolf, Mákoskalács (1910)

for Maria, James and Antonia Eliason

 

What will I do with this little still life,

the empty cereal plate, floral pattern

jug of milk and plain butter croissant

on the tablecloth retaining its folds,

shaken that morning from the hot press,

and poppyseed cake on a green dish,

finely glazed Zsolnay it looks like,

waiting to be bitten into, dense

and dark with a million poppy seeds

scattering all over the dining room

if I’m not careful, a bentwood chair

foreshortened against a lilac wall

on which a crucifixion scene hangs

and two other prints off to the side,

Hungarian light in the empty glass

reflecting a window where the Puszta

stretches all the way to the Carpathians,

or reflecting nothing, a painter’s whim,

his desire to bring light to the subject,

to have us notice his eye for things

that day in 1910 in the dining room?

The San Francisco veteran photographer Jerry Burchard has died. His particular creative corner of the image world was a dark one, shot through with accidental and long-travelled light. I first met Jerry in Bangkok in 1985 when he lived in a rooftop apartment opposite my ground-floor one on Soi Wittialai Khru. He was a warm, jolly, rotund man in colourfully-patterned shirts. He walked the city at night with his camera, catching not so much the people as the way streetlight and neon bounce off buildings. He was a third-generation Rochester Kodak boy and a patient hoarder of ambient light.

I wanted to use his seminal photo ‘Dancing Trees, Ko Samet’ as the cover of my book The Fever Wards, and this initiated an email exchange last year. My publishers had other ideas but here it is again in all its ghostly glory. The acid green and warm umbers have an almost hallucinatory joy to them, and this on an island where the larger trees are swathed in saffron swatches and spirit houses placed underneath them.

Jerry’s Bangkok is a two in the morning one, a night out on the town. His images strip away so much in order to get back to the light. His old teak house I remember well and from the image you’d never guess there were six lanes of traffic behind the photographer. The sky seems to have gathered all the pollution of the city into an extra-terrestrial purple and the house itself has become a sort of south-east Asian Bates motel. I suspect the developers have eaten up the house but Jerry’s haunting image remains in light.

This last image reminds me of those weekends out of the city in the mid-Eighties when we might spend half an hour before bed on the rickety bamboo terrace that fronted the island’s stilted bungalows. The stars were out in force. There was a smell of mosquito coil and salty beach-wear hanging up to dry. We might not have been in our right minds – we were far gone. The sea has come right up to the rocks. Further up the beach there might be late-night revels at Edgy Sue’s. John would be reading Kapuściński and I might be reading Bowles. When down the beach would come Jerry Burchard, tripod in hand, forty minutes of night light locked away in his camera.

More photos and tributes to Jerry Burchard here:  http://jerryburchard.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s not often that a photographer, particularly a contemporary one, strikes with the force of a painting, a Whistler say, or with the relentless onward stride of Dante’s multitudes moving through his Inferno. Here’s T. S. Eliot:

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

In Titarenko’s photos the human mass becomes shadow, shade – it is we who are passing through a landscape that becomes more solid than the crowd – we are a human wave. Titarenko captures the Russian tide passing through the faded, exhausted city of St. Petersburg in the early 1990s. Metal and stone seem to have more substance and staying power than flesh.

He brings out this evanescent quality of people and light in some haunting shots of Cuba in his Havana Series from 2003.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the series Time Standing Still, the lone figure of a woman at a Russian beach leaning on a silver birch seems to be trying to arrest time. The reclining, leisure-seeking figures seem to be not so much on a physical beach but on a shore of time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Titarenko is a marvellous capturer of light and shadow. You can see a full portfolio of his work here: http://www.alexeytitarenko.com/index.html