(P/B) ARTISTS

Παρουσίαση

I AM CONTEMPLATING TWO PHOTOGRAPHS of his friend Charles Baudelaire taken by Nadar in the mid-1850s. In the first, the poet, now in his mid-thirties, is standing at an angle to the camera, left hand in his trouser pocket, the silk lining of his closely fitted jacket exposed, round his neck a large bow-tied cravat. He looks sideways, directly into the lens, eyes intense, lips pursed, the light catching the left side of his face and forehead, from which his hair is swept back. The image is slightly out of focus, and seems over-exposed, the illuminated half-face starkly white, the featureless space in which he stands going into darkness in front of him. Baudelaire liked this portrait enough to have owned it. Perhaps it was the almost fleeting, apparition-like immateriality of the image that appealed: the intensely self-aware dandy-poet caught between light and dark. The other photograph, again both imperfectly focused and exposed, pictures him leaning backwards into an armchair, with his high forehead catching the light, which comes this time from the left of the picture, illuminating his hands against the undifferentiated darkness of his coat, the left raised to his cheek, the right resting on white gloves on his lap. His raised collar and right arm create a dark diagonal silhouette from upper right to lower left. His expression is dreamy, as if thought had deserted him, but the slight angle of his head to the diagonal division of darkness and light destroys any sence of repose, and the blurring of the image around his face creates a mysterious vagueness out of which the poet seems to be emerging like a ghost. [...] (From the publisher)