W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #michaelflomen, #sometroutwillriseforsomehats, #stephenleacock, #fishstory 

This may be a fish story.  Michael Flomen’s spirit animal is most certainly the trout — swimming freely, at one with Nature. catching the light,  

By the end of the 1990s, Flomen had completed and started presenting a portfolio of works collectively known as “Trout Will Rise for Some Hats”.  The title references a 1936 Stephen Leacock essay, “My Fish Pond”.  Leacock was a Canadian writer known for his wry sensibility.  

Leacock’s pond has no fish in it.  The essay is a Zen koan.  “There are no fish in my pond.  So far as I know there never have been.  But I have never found that to make any difference.  Certainly none to the men I bring there, my chance visitors from the outside world, for an afternoon of casting”. *1

These are philosophic and photographic considerations of water.  The paper for the prints has been cut to follow its unusual shape with graceful curving lines, with the edges mimicking the arc of a fly fishing line. *2

The works are exceptional, even subversive and gorgeous.

Flomen is swimming is his own special pond.  He even published the works using  “Trout Splashes Press” as his imprint.

When Flomen moved away from through the lens image making — street photography — to camera-less work, his world expanded.  He moved from the “Decisive Moment” of Henri Cartier-Bresson to, let’s call it, the “Invisible Event” in which light gathers on the photo sensitive film or paper and is revealed in the darkroom.  As his outrage quickens into resolve and action, Hamlet, in Act IV, Scene iv of the play, alludes to the “invisible event," the suggestion of almost subversive activity, offstage, yet at the center of the creative act.  The aggregation of things seemingly unseen is seen.

Flomen crawls through grass inviting fireflies to dance on sheets of large negative film or the moon and stars to pass through water or snow on to pieces of light sensitive paper.  He has infinite patience and at the same time it’s all very active too; he likes titles like “Being and “Teeming”.

Flomen is a jack, a male trout basking in the light in the shallows of a stream, catching it for us in silver flashes.

If you have ever witnessed a black and white photograph being printed, in a dark room, you have witnessed that abracadabra moment when a plain sheet of paper astonishingly fills with an image.  If you slowed down that mysterious action, you could see each of the photo-sensitized crystals darken in proportion to the amount of absorbed light to which it has been exposed.  

It’s science and art, this most basic act and art of “fixing the shadow”.  Here the artist is using the essentials of light and chemistry on paper to make photograms or light drawings when he moves the direction of the source of illumination by adjusting the position of the photo sensitive paper or film.  

In photography, there is a difference between identity and evidence.  There has always been an informational component — data.  Your driver’s license photo identifies you.  It is descriptive.  That is what you look like.   It is your photographic equivalent.

Perhaps the Academy’s reluctance to recognize photography as an art form had to do with its objectifying quality, its representational accuracy, this report of identity.  Even today critical regard for so called “straight” photography may have mostly to do with the changing definition of art in contemporary terms rather than its actual status as an art form.  Art today is as much about intention and idea as object and performance. 

Is it heretical to suggest that the regard for representational artists from Nan Goldin to James Nachtwey may have more to do with our recognition of their visual aesthetic and intention than the pictures themselves?

Writer Andy Grundberg seems further frustrated in his consideration of photographic abstraction.  He writes “photography, the most representational of visual media, is ultimately unable to become abstract.  Instead it serves to represent the idea of abstraction … .” *3

Look at the work of Michael Flomen as evidence, photo-based works realized through the incremental aggregation of light through long exposure, often without a camera or any optical intercession.  The final image is the evidence of an unseen, unseeable invisible event.  It is like the visual report of a fourth dimension.  It is not literal.  What accumulates on the light-sensitized surface has a single, unique reality, but it is a fiction, an abstraction from light.  The artist is finding his way through a combination of the conscious and unconscious, skill and accident. 

Historically this work seems close to that of Étienne Jules Marey whose long exposures of movement produced a single image, depicting a pole vaulter placing the pole, sailing in an arc over the bar, then landing, all in one.  Earlier there is Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s Paris Boulevard scene with a shoeshine man.  A figure passes in and out of the frame and gives us the spectral evidence of his presence (and absence). 

With Eadweard Muybridge and Harold Edgerton, the progenitors of stop-action photography, you have single frames of frozen moments.  These are identities.  The horse does, indeed have all four feet off of the ground.  It is not any more complex than that.

It isn’t until the work of Gjon Mili that we have an almost three-dimensional, hologram-like ghost of a figure descending the staircase.  It seems dense and magical.

Consider even more recent space photographs, of constellations.  Even through the best telescope we cannot see what ultimately is revealed in the photograph.  Light arrives and collects over a period of time, the celestial nebulae gather shape and form, even color.  It is like that wonderfully corny moment in “Star Wars” or “Trek” when the booster rockets engage the thrusters to hit warp speed in hyperspace; time stops as we change dimensions as super novas surround us.  

Look at this technically too.  The way in which an Abstract Expressionist builds up a canvas is analogous to Flomen building up an image.  The term gesture in painting may be comparable to a photographer’s subjective handling of the unpredictable variables, light and chemistry.  Technique and experience inform an artist’s instinct for exposure time, how to let the mystery happen before fixing the image.  The “invisible event” takes place offstage, out of sight, and the image is the performance of evidence of its happening. 

Flomen works in a large format in the spirit of  abstract expressionist painters.  Mr. Flomen is like the painter Ellsworth Kelly, spare and direct.  It is not simple, but thoughtful and considered.  In time Flomen’s works have gotten more sizable and even luridly colorful, but if you go back to the shapes in “Trout will Rise," one senses the artist’s need to see beyond the square or rectangle.  Humans see elliptically; our field of vision goes beyond the edge of the frame.  Flomen knows that.

Earlier in his career, the artist printed other artists’ images, specifically Jaques-Henri Lartigue.  If you ever look at that artist’s work shot with a two-lens stereoscopic camera, the printed image is an oval.  Usually it is the framer, who mats and captures the images within a rectangle.  The real edge is a curve; that has been reinterpreted by Flomen in his “Trout” pieces. 

Flomen is playing in the light in the shallows and the deep end of his consciousness and ability.  To exhaust the metaphor, he works against the current of the unknown in Nature and the dark room.  His discoveries are fresh and unexpected; he challenges himself and his audience.  

He dances on the water.  

To paraphrase, Henry David Thoreau, “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after”. *4

*1  Stephen Leacock, “Trout Will Rise for Some Hats”, 1936, Atlantic Press

*2  The artist acknowledge this was at the suggestion of his friend and frequent collaborator, Peter Sibbald Brown.. 

*3  “The Representation of Abstraction/The Abstraction of Representation” Andy Grundberg, “Crisis of the Real, Writings on Photography, 1974-1989”), Aperture Foundation Inc., 1990), page 165

*4  Henry David Thoreau, Journal, January 26, 1853. “It is remarkable that many men will go with eagerness to Walden Pond in the winter to fish for pickerel and yet not seem to care for the landscape. Of course it cannot be merely for the pickerel they may catch; there is some adventure in it; but any love of nature which they may feel is certainly very slight and indefinite. They call it going a-fishing, and so indeed it is, though perchance, their natures know better. Now I go a-fishing and a-hunting every day, but omit the fish and the game, which are the least important part. I have learned to do without them. They were indispensable only as long as I was a boy. I am encouraged when I see a dozen villagers drawn to Walden Pond to spend a day in fishing through the ice, and suspect that I have more fellows than I knew, but I am disappointed and surprised to find that they lay so much stress on the fish which they catch or fail to catch, and on nothing else, as if there were nothing else to be caught”.

This essay was commissioned in 2021 for a monograph of works by Michel Flomen.  

© 2021 

#somereallygoodones, #theunseeneye, #wmhunt, #collectiondancingbear, #collectionblindpirate, #greatphotographs, #howilookatphotographs, #photographsfromtheunconsicous, #collectingislikerunningaroundinathunderstormhopingyoullbehitbylightning, #aphotographsogooditmakesyoufartlightning, #photographychangeditlifeitgavemeone, #michaelflomen, #sometroutwillriseforsomehats, #stephenleacock, #fishstory