Solitude and inmediacy: a look to photography and art in modern times.

Image of camera obscura

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Photography; a modern art. It has participated, decisively, along with the cinema, in the formation of the contemporary human being. Photography is specifically born within the industrial development that began at the end of the 18th century, but it is thanks to a series of investigations that go back to the 4th century BC with Aristotle's notes on the phenomenon of the camera obscura, but which takes practical form in the fifteenth century with Leonardo Da Vinci. But it was not until the beginning of the 19th century that for the first time the first photographic images of Nicephore Niepce were obtained with the use of a dark camera and a pewter plate covered in bitumen.

Look from the window in Le Gras, first photograph by Niepce

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As a result of this development of industry and technology, modern man and consequently the post-modern ones develop a connection with immediacy. This quality has led to a series of new ways of understanding life, and art, moving the story now around this. The immediacy is a feature of technology, and especially of new technologies; the Internet, digital photography ... etc. And in the twentieth century artistic trends are born absolutely linked to this; Dadaism with its ready mades, the fluxus with its happenings ... So, the impact that this has had on us, the humans, and the way in which we relate to each other, is undeniable.

Happening by Yves Klein / The fountain- Duchamp

In the film BREATHLESS by Jean Luc Godard, in a scene Jean Pierre Melville is interviewed, and they ask him "Does the soul exist in modern society?" ... To consider existence from modernity as a nihilistic phenomenon, lacking in meaning It is a constant, especially from the art. What spawned a generation of artists who sought rather to end art, for its supposed lack of meaning. The technical reproducibility, following Walter Benjamin, took the art from its auratic sense. The massive reproduction of the product gave a less elevated place to art, and placed it in some way, according to Benjamin, at the order of the masses, the people.

The fact of massification and immediacy have defined man since then. It is what makes it possible to pose the question of the existence of the soul in modernity. With philosophies like that Niesztche’s that raises the death of God. In this time, man, through reason and logic, seeks his total freedom and autonomy. And in that spectrum is born an individualist human, hand in hand with industrial development in which now individuals are perceived as working machines. We can see it in movies like Modern times by Charlie Chaplin or Metropolis by Fritz Lang

Modern times

The isolated man, in paradoxical solitude to the mass production of things. However, history is defined by dichotomies. For a place man is molded individual, and on the other born manifestations that force the collective, to be together, for example; cinema. By this I do not mean that the fact of individuality is incorrect, only that the meaning it takes in modernism is directed towards the benefit of a group, and not towards the introspection of each human being.

Kids watching puppets in The 400 blows by F. Truffaut

I believe that all this harms us and benefits us at the same time. On the one hand, all this conception so limited and alienating of the human being, in which they function as objects of work and already (characteristic of industrialization) deviated from the spiritual path of man. But on the other hand they always existed, they have existed, and there will always exist contestatory and oppositional responses. And it is no accident that the 20th century is full of so many anti-system movements. And how does that benefit us? Well, in new alternative ways of understanding ourselves as humans, new forms of creation., Vanguards ... History is an infinite future.

The particular solitude of modern man is, in some way, inculcated by these new ways of perceiving the environment through the lens. To me, photography (in addition to other experiences) made me understand solitude, but not from sadness but from the place where the human being is inevitably condemned to that, from an existentialist point of view and I also understood it with beauty.

Portrait of Huxley

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"We live together and we act and react on each other, but always, in all circumstances, we are alone. The martyrs entered the circus holding hands, but were crucified in isolation. Embraced, the lovers try desperately to merge their isolated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence, but to no avail. By its very nature, every spirit with an incarnation is condemned to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, intuitions, imaginations and fantasies are always private things and, except by means of symbols and second hand, incommunicable. We can form a common fund of information about experiences, but not about the experiences themselves. From the family to the nation, each human group is a society of island universes. "- Aldous Huxley, The doors of perception.

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The doors of perception

Photography is mainly an individual act ... then, of interacting with others. It is first to understand the ONE, to understand the OTHER. From unity to otherness. From me to you. And thanks to digitalization, it is an immediate act. But what things are conjured emotionally and psychically in the act of the immediate?

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"Extract the eternal from the transient" - The painter of modern life, Charles Baudelaire.

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Charles Baudelaire painted by Gustave Courbet

The transient is everything. Understanding that everything moves in a temporal space flow that always happens, and changes. Photography as a modern art, it seems to me that it is the art that has as its principle in solitude, which was born within a system in which man experienced a great metamorphosis. Photography has documented this new man, and it has claimed it in images. To the modern man, "soulless", photography has given him one, a new spirit, and a new face, definitive and direct, now more infinite than ever. It broke the limits of the image, of the pictorial. Now the human being represents himself, without mediations. Portraying loneliness is something that interests and worries me, because I see it SO SO PRESENT in the lives of all people. And I think that to make art from that, is to break the fear of that state, it is to transcend the ideas that one has about solitude, always of evasion. Solitude does not mean that we can not love and share, it means for me, to feel in communion with the inability to merge or share the very internal and that ultimately places us in a space where without remedy we are always alone with ourselves. Even so, there is the illusion of experiencing similar things and trying (through art, for example) that this solitude becomes one with others.

Horse galloping photographic experiment by Edward Muybridge

It seems to me that seeing all these changes within humanity and art from mistrust is a big mistake, industrialization and new technologies have contributed much to the universe. And if other things have damaged or corrupted, we will know how to save ourselves. We have known how to do it, especially in art. Would we have cinema and photography without all these new ideas?

I do not know if humanity has taken the right or the wrong way. I can not know it. But in spite of the disasters of modernity, I am grateful to have been born in this time and to share space and mind with all this imaginary.

Broadway Boogie Woogie - Piet Mondrian

I am grateful for film, photography, impressionism, post - impressionism, fuauvism, cubism, experimental music, new philosophies, beat poets, poets, anti poets, jazz, Caracas brutalist architecture, grateful for all the art that I have been able to feel, that has taught me to live, from a conceptual piece to great cinematographic works, all that whose creators in an eagerness to find new ways of saying things from within, made the world, built universes in determined times where the hostility of their times led them to want to break the established and rebuild, always rebuild. We are still in those times, I feel part of it. In post modernity there are still many things to break, and reassemble ... So that then someone with a great intuition, return to the same cycle. The history, the life.

Woman in front of the mirror - Pablo Picasso

In the end, all change entails a destruction of past objects. And so, roads are built. Deconstruction and reconstruction is part of our functioning and behavior. I celebrate the mysterious moments of solitude and encounter with others. Of surprise and change. Here I share the first projected film in history, THE arrival of the train of the Lumiere brothers, whose projection caused so much impression to each viewer to see the train coming in a frontal direction that, without even suspecting the operation of the moving images, came out fleeing from the room. Historical event, wonderful, and full of something that moves me.

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In the solitude of each one we share the world together, and in the immediacy we share the enduring, the infinite.

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I wish you liked the post. I await for your comments.

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