W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #sergiolarrain, #grace, #thecenterforphotographyatwoodstock, #jeanpaulgoude, #melissaspringer

This is some writing about grace. Grace can be about the pleasure of looking at photographs, a kind of grace in itself.

Grace resonates. It is the perfect chord. We respond instinctively to grace. As Goldilocks remarked reviewing the third bed, it’s the quality of being just right.

Typologies in photography offer a good way of looking and learning. Geoff Dyer’s “Ongoing Moment”*1 wears out this idea in his exhaustive/exhausted exploration of tropes in photography, but in the first part of the book, when the game’s afoot, it’s fascinating, like his consideration of many picket fences.  

I play the game with road pictures, moving from Roger Fenton to Robert Frank and on to the present. For me it comes as an almost rhetorical existential impulse. With grace, I can seek about images that are grace-ful: lyrical, pleasing to the eye as the road uncurls into the void.

Grace is about looking. We all look at thousands of photographs — hundreds of thousands images. We are expert at looking at photographs. Anyone in the Western world is an old hand at looking.  

With grace, my immediate vision is of a languid undulating line. Through the history of art you can see all those naked people with the weight on one leg,. That’s got to be grace, right? Our eye immediately and measuredly follows the sinuous and sensuous flow of the model’s hip. Grace is an S-curve, literally a serpentine, curving sine-like. It is full of grace, graceful.

Like a haiku, grace is not excessive; full just to the brim. The addition of anything extraneous - of one more drop - and the contents spill over.   

There are all the conflict images of grace under fire , grace under pressure, transcendent states of mind when our systems vibrate, when we are shifted into higher gear. Not serenity or clarity, but life-saving grace.

Grace implies a spiritual reckoning, release from the unremarkable. Isn’t all of spatial searching our wrestling with mortality? “There but for the grace of … go I …”. Grace can a prayer at dinner. Through time we have sought out advisors we address as “Your Grace”.The outpouring of work catalyzed by the AIDS and COVID 19 pandemics is the product of artists processing the muting terror and confusion and trying to articulate a responses with incredible grace. Perhaps the outcry over Benneton’s use of the dying AIDS patient surrounded by his family was perceived as transgressing the intense private and personal nature of grace. Think also of grace as benediction, a supplication asking for release from the gravity of life.  

Children live in a state of grace. There is an unexpected tension and balancing act between the two halves in the illustrated Sergio Larrain photograph from Chile. The boy in the lower half seems to be striving to support the steel beam and the boys above him, one of whom exudes an trance-like calm. The compostion is striking with its angles and doubling, light and dark offering its own non-narrative story telling.  

Larrain is not a household name, but he left a remarkable legacy of thoughtful works made as he “pursued a state of grace for himself”*1. “Good photography, or any other manifestation in man, comes from a state of grace. Grace comes when you are delivered from conventions, obligations, conveniences, competition, and you are free, like a child in his first discovery of reality. You walk around in surprise, seeing reality as if for the first time.”*2

That’s grace.  

*1 Geoff Dyer, “The Ongoing Moment”, (Canongate Books 2005)

*2 Source for both quotes is unknown. 

Note: In 1997 I had curated a show called “delirium” which was my introduction with Ricco/Maresca Gallery, NYC (where it was featured) and APERTURE, which published “delirium” as the fall 1998 issue and a culmination of a life of looking at photographs.

There was a sequel, “Grace”, exhibited at The Center for Photography for Photography at Woodstock in conjunction with an illustrated catalogue and essay published in the October 2000/Photography Quarterly/PQ 78/. This new is essay is adapted from that.  

Both “delirium” and “Grace” — all of the shows I’ve done —, have been about looking. I used to do a mental exercise of coming up with additional titles like “race” and “class” which both have a range of meanings and implications photographically. It makes for an opportunity to put seemingly disparate images next to each other.  

“Grace” is a good one too.  

©2021

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