‘IT IS A WELL KNOWN FACT THAT ONE NEVER SEES
THE SUN IN A DREAM, ALTHOUGH ONE IS OFTEN AWARE OF SOME FAR BRIGHTER LIGHT’
GÉRARD DE NERVAL, FROM AURELIA (1855)
While many artists now work with both the moving image and still
photography, the dialogue between the two mediums in any one artist’s
practice can produce varying results. Anri Sala is well established for his
videos and films, exhibiting extensively on an international stage since the
late 1990s, after completing his highly personal video Intervista in 1998
and later Nocturnes in 1999. While Sala’s photography has had less exposure
than his films, it nevertheless forms an engaging, intriguing and integral
aspect of his practice. His still images provide an illuminating platform
from which to consider how these two mediums both complement and force each
out of their own respective comfort zones.
Sala’s first substantial artistic project was in fact a series of
photographs taken in 1992 when he was just 18 years old, before he went on
to study painting at art college. It was only much later that Sala revisited
these images, having discarded painting for video and photography, when he
published them in 2003 as an artist’s book entitled A Thousand Windows, The
World of the Insane. These unassuming black and white photographs show
newspaper sellers hawking their wares on the street corners and pavements of
his hometown Tirana. As the first free elections in Albania had just been
held and the media was no longer under state control, they commemorate the
sudden explosion of independent newspapers and the emergence of a new and
hungry market for alternative information channels. As a series, they recall
the disinterested anthropological style of Pierre Bourdieu’s photographs
from Algeria in the late 1960s and similarly record a unique moment in a
country’s political, social and cultural history.
There are probably many reasons why this early series seemed pertinent to
Sala so many years later, the most obvious being the way its documentary
content is recorded in a singular and restrained visual language, an
approach that bears more relation to his later films than his other
photography. Sala’s video works are often defined by their photographic
quality, often shot from one camera angle for the duration of each piece,
recording almost imperceptible movements within the frame. A particular
example, Uomoduomo (2001), shown at the Venice Biennale in the same year,
depicts an old man sleeping in Milan Cathedral. The only movement comes from
the man shifting unconsciously in his seat as his reflexes prevent him from
falling onto the floor. In another, entitled Time After Time (2003), a horse
stands, either bored or scared we cannot tell, in the headlights of highway
traffic – its fidgeting movements illuminated only temporarily by the
passing cars.
Utilising a classically photographic stricture of only using available
light, Sala does not – unlike the classical photographer – attempt to
produce imagery in a high ‘technical’ standard. He pushes his equipment to
its limits, so that form begins to disintegrate, and light and darkness
enter into dialogue. Sala has often noted his interest in twilight, calling
his major solo show in 2004 ‘Entre chien en loup’, a term referring to the
moment when the indistinctness of twilight makes it hard to tell ‘between a
dog and wolf’. A small series of black and white images from 2002, Untitled
[Zone 1] and Untitled [Zone 2], are confusing in a similar way. They show a
dilapidated wall surrounded by unremarkable piles of rubble, shot from two
almost imperceptibly different angles. The names suggest something of the
intricate ‘Zone’ system formulated by Ansel Adams in the production of
seamlessly realised black and white photographs, but there is no such system
employed here. The sun shines from somewhere off frame, but into the lens of
the camera, and the image breaks up into over-exposed highlights and
under-exposed shadow. The resulting images are reduced to the texture of the
camera film attempting to make sense of the information before it.
In similarly pared-down fashion, a series of photographs were produced in
Senegal by Sala at the same time as his video Làk-kat (2004). In the film,
Sala records two young Senegalese boys speaking a series of words in the
native Wolof language – the subtitles explain they are practising various
terms for ‘white’ and ‘black’ which in Wolof change depending on whether
they refer to skin or light. The image is in almost complete darkness and,
in the confines of the half-lit scene, appears all the more in shadow. We
can only make out the occasional flashes from the boys’ eyes and teeth as
they speak the words or glance up at the fluorescent light overhead. We hear
– and then see – what distracts them: the sound of moths flying into the
strip light above. The eight photographs Sala produced at the same time
reveal his interest in what he terms the cadre and hors cadre (literally,
what is ‘within frame’ and ‘out of the frame’). Untitled [Corner] (2004)
shows a ceiling of a white room, onto which black spots appeared to have
gathered in the corners. We realise that these are small moths, recorded
over a number of days, taking refuge until nightfall. The images are all
shot from the same angle, and the configurations of the small insects only
subtly change from one image to the next. The over exposure of the work
bleaches the white of the walls, and makes the moths look almost like
musical notes or indecipherable script. In many respects these two pieces of
work indicate what attracts Sala to photography. In a recent interview with
Hans Ulrich Obrist, he stated, ‘It is one scene, but it’s dense, it feels
like it has a beginning and an end. That’s what interests me about
photography. It’s the compression of a story and the compression of time in
a photograph. That is different from video, because with video you have the
possibility of developing stories.’
The idea of compression is something Sala compares more to painting than
film. His attraction to the still image enables a productive extension of
his interest in what he terms a ‘mute syntax’; where video can allude to
stillness and silence, the photograph is, literally, mute. In fact, what
most characterises Sala’s photographic work is its dream-like partiality,
where the subject, like Nerval’s sun, resides intangibly outside of the
frame.
Clare grafik is a programme organiser at the photographers’ gallery, london, and photography editor for contemporary