the soul is not a soul

27. Mai
3 Min. Lesezeit

Aktualisiert: 28. Mai

John Ashbery writes in his poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror":

...the soul is not a soul,

Has no secret, is small, and it fits

Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.

It's a long poem, and it reflects on a painting by Parmigianino from 1524, in which the artist offers himself as if looked at through a mirror that bulges outward. A convex surface. Curiously, his canvas was a wooden board of the same shape. So he leaves us pondering where we are and where the sitter is, what his actual shape is and what our own perspective is in all of that. It is, as if we are poised. Do we really stand where we think we stand in relation to the sitter, who seems to be looking out of the mirror - or is it the wooden board?

Now this got me hooked. Does this painting, and I think that's what Ashbery traces in his poem, present us with a true version of the sitter? True in all its distortion? The longer you look at it, the more the surface of the painting unravels. And what's underneath if not the soul.

So here I'm back at photography. I have this interest in looking past the surface of things. In a way, photography - like film - takes place all but on the surface. A screen, a print, a projection. There is seemingly nothing beyond it, materially speaking. But of course there is. Some paintings, photographs, films draw our attention precisely to the surface through textured movement or grain. Film scholar Laura U. Marks calls this inviting a gaze that brushes over and lingers on the surface of an image. And what happens then is that our gaze gets reflected back to our own surface and beyond: inward. We complete images with our own memories, knowledge, associations.

Is that our soul? Connecting us to the soul of the sitter? A small moment of attention that, for a moment, lets us see a truth, without secret? I really do wonder as to what shape Ashbery imagines the soul to have - when it is indeed a soul.

I've traced all of this recently in the documentary Shaman Ravens about Henry Fraser's paintings, in my PhD work on trauma and the (moving) image and again and again in my photography. The soul keeps coming back to me, and less invisible than I would have imagined it to be.

In the image above, I photographed myself in a normal mirror in a long exposure. I moved the camera in a tiny movement while the shutter was open. It was a spontaneous shot, without much thought for composition. The kinds of shots you take quickly, in passing. Later, when I looked at it on my camera, it struck me as, well, good. I liked it. I like the almost curdled texture, which sets me in motion. I can see myself in it, my insides that are always on the move, simmering, glowing. I almost feel there is more of me there.

There is another line in Ashbery's poem that got me:

And just as there are no words for surface, that is,

No words to say what it really is, that it is not

Superficial but a visible core.

When have you last gotten a glimpse of someone's soul, in real-life or in an artwork? If you have, keep it safe, at least for a while, in its perfect hollow.

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Postscript: Incidentally, a day after publishing this, I've come across a portrait series of Cate Blanchett that Jack Davison did for the New York Times. I will say no more about Cate Blanchett. But, these photographs stand as a marvellous example of when something is dislodged in the supposedly linear trajectory of a body being captured in a photograph.

The writer of the NYT article, Jordan Kisner, writes about Blanchett: "Even in moments of raw emotional exposure, something of the person onscreen remains out of reach — some depth that is sensed rather than seen."