Tamas Tollas
Black and White Photography
I have been photographing seriously since I was an undergraduate and this portfolio reflects that long journey. My early work was concerned with the documentation of architectural and sculptural spaces. A few of these photographs, taken in Europe or Central America, are included in the Places without Men gallery. These places remain important, and are included much as biographical coordinates which chart memorable locations. The second category, Men in Places, includes with a single exception only examples of recent work. My continued interest in evocative places and formal principles will be apparent.
An artist’s statement is frequently theoretical, but I also intend to offer some personal reflections on my images. My work is exclusively in black and white and might be described as dark. This should be understood in several ways. There is a luminosity and an obscurity in the natural world -- the struggle between light and shadow. I am attracted to low key images where black is more prominent than white, and where shadows and silhouettes are of the proper order. Light for me is never neutral. Sometimes I use light not simply to illuminate, but to scorch; light does not embrace the model but rather stalks him. And the work is dark in another sense, for I am interested in those themes which invoke magic, ritual, and transformations. This is the occult world, the hidden dimension. There is also an erotic aspect to my work, for Eros too, is transformative and related to any journey in the darker realms. And on yet another level, properly phenomenological, shadows demand our attention. One lurks in the shadows, one escapes in shadows, laws are twisted in shadows. Perhaps this is the ultimate metaphor for living on the border, on the periphery.
I identify myself as an Esoteric Symbolist Photographer. Ultimately this term derives from the Symbolist movement in painting and includes such figures as Sascha Schneider, Mikhail Vrubel, and Jean Delville. The tradition in photography surfaces under various designations, but ancestors include Fred Holland Day, Rudolf Koppitz, and William Mortensen. Though these figures differ significantly, they are united through an interest in the occult and a tendency to redefine symbolism. Instead of a direct one to one correspondence which characterized the symbol in earlier iconography, the Symbolist artists aimed rather for nuance and suggestion. As my working interpretation, I avoid the familiar emblems of traditional iconography and focus on the often ambiguous references in the esoteric canon. My galleries are identified with a title to suggest the sphere of occult speculation which inspired them.
But why designate galleries as Men in Places? First, the Places. Consciously or unconsciously, we have a personal relationship with a particular city, a particular spatial configuration. In my own experiences, I can claim this relationship with numerous cities. A city is a private place, with each well traveled street or corridor leading to personal crossroads or recognized features. A space must be transformed by meaning, by rituals which breed fantasy with paths, value with landmarks. Especially engaging are liminal places in cities, as cemeteries, overgrown parks, alleys and deserted buildings. To offer a literary analogy, consider the adventures of Lucius in The Golden Ass of Apuleius. This work of the second century CE is a testament to curiosity and the search for magic in the world.
As soon as the darkness was dispersed by the beams of the newborn Sun, I threw off sleep and my bedclothes, and leaped from bed. I am normally eager and only too inclined to ferret out the Rare and the Marvelous and now, reflecting that I was located in the very heart of Thessaly, which is universally acclaimed as the aboriginal crucible of the Art of Magic …I was so agog with desire and zeal and I savoured every detail with gleeful curiosity. In fact, there was nothing that I saw as I walked about the city which I did not believe to be something other than it was. Everything seemed to me to have been just struck by some fatal incantation into a quite contrary image. I thought that the stones on which I trod were petrified men, that the birds twittering in my ears were enchanted men with plumes, that the trees surrounding the Pomerium were men magically spirting into leaves, and that the waters of the fountains were flowing human bodies. I thought that the statues would step down and walk, that the pictures would move, that the walls would speak, that the oxen and other cattle would tell me strange news, and that the heavens and the sun's orb of glory would make a sudden annunciation.
[translation of Jack Lindsay]
What are the poetics of this place? This is the essence of the magical world, where transformations give meaning to movement in space. My task as a photographer is to capture the Thessaly which Lucius explores, though without any penalty for excessive curiosity. I need to enact rituals, to preserve magic. So often when I look at what appears to be an ordinary object, activity, or expression, I find revealed an amulet, a ritual, or an incantation. What Apuleius crafted with metaphor, I try to construct with various props, with the magic of contrast, line, and geometry.
And the Men. There are no great photographs of cities, villages, or forests, without men in them. Such is the poverty of landscape photography. Space must become an inhabited place; it must be worked, crafted, and staged for exploration. These places, these ritual sites, have no resonance unless a man can be traced. A photograph is the memory of an interaction between the place, the photographer, and the model. Position a man with an erection against a tree in an isolated place. This is a dialogue of textures, of impermanence and durability, of nature and imitation, of memory and anticipation. We take pleasure in the places that are transformed, now vital through Eros and magic. Thus the model will be recalled as he focuses the memory for the viewer. And the viewer must now ask questions, must continue to ask questions.
There are various ways in which my work could be characterized. An example which suggests formal principle and personal reflection should be useful. Why are the men in my work so frequently dressed in white shirts?. This is, in part, a technical consideration. Though I prefer low key images I want tonal separation, and the shirt provides a muted luminosity. This is also effective in composition.
But this is not the whole tale. In the 60s when I was beginning my sexual and photographic odyssey, white shirts were worn by those who occupy the borders of society, those men to whom I was attracted. Perhaps it was intended as a parody of the white collar worker, but for whatever reason, it was common in Europe. Once a promise of sobriety and traditional values, it had become for me a statement of rebellion. White shirts carelessly tucked into old jeans, seemed to drape as seductive wraps on 2nd century sculptures. We were ready for tracking barges and river rats, exploring drain pipes and cemeteries, or just smoking in the alleys we haunted.
But perhaps the most important and most personal reason, is that I frequently must provide white shirts for models. They either do not own a white shirt, or only one in the approved size. I need the fluid natural fabric, the full cut, and the wide sleeves which can often only be found in the classic styles I prefer. Therefore, I always have old shirts with sufficient fabric to position, to fold, to tuck. This provenance adds an obvious erotic element to these images, an added intimacy. Men in white shirts in places.
Photographs are not representations, but presentations. Photographs always lie, selectively focus, and preserve a theatrical perspective. Then too, I often use what are termed ‘props’, or theatrical properties, to give substance to the ritual. Not only am I manipulating the scene as a photographer in numerous ways, but the picture is only a slice, a thin flake of time, which offers a focused but hardly nuanced image of an interaction.. And where are the farts, the thirst, the impatience, the shivers, the coaxing to create a visible erection, the taste of smoke in the air, the swirling elements which can never be captured on a sensor or on film? The photograph is an abstraction of the most profound sort, which is enhanced through black and white capture. The photograph is true, but it is not real! Thus there is no correct interpretation of any photograph, but a host of approximations which might bask in one or more emanations. All are true, yet even the sum are not real. Photographs are mysterious; they open a portal and close it before you can even phrase your questions. But then the dialogue begins.