Читать книгу The Absolute, Relatively Inaccessible - Walter Wangerin - Страница 5

In 1939 Ansel Adams photographed the photographer Alfred Stieglitz while the latter stood in an indiscernible corner of his gallery, An American Place.

Your praise is never disintegrating . . . I can see only one thing to do—make photography as clean, as decisive, and as honest as possible.

Adams’ letter to Stieglitz, November 1963

1.

So white

the twice-high ceiling

and white the walls that stand background

to the old man’s figure;

so white the corner-join behind him

it scarcely makes a shadow.

Existence purified, you might say—

except for this one dark thing,

Alfred Stieglitz, whose right hand

hangs slack at his waist,

holding the stem of his eyeglasses

loosely between his fingers.

The old photographer wears a black

double-breasted suit:

a buttoned vest, rumpled pants,

and a white, open-collared shirt.

But his slouch (which discomposes the hang of the jacket)

and his insouciance (one jacket-flap fully in its pocket,

the other, one corner in, one corner out)

belie the suit’s formality.

Alfred’s eyes are as distant as white-noise,

the lip-edge of his moustache

sheared as straight

as a technical principle.

2.

Most folks know Ansel Adams as a photographer

in awe-full communion with the violent moon,

that argent globe fixed in midnight,

indifferent to the wrack of cenotaphs below.

Most ought to know Stieglitz as the first to claim place

for black-and-white photographs

(art, if you please) on the walls of empurpled museums—

MoMA of the muses;

and most ought to know him as a paterfamilias

in communion with young initiates

like this broad-faced Adams fresh from the west,

whose photos Stieglitz displayed on the walls of his “American Place.”

3.

Ansel’s camera, its flash, his shot of Alfred

(the whole pictorial act)

counts two segments

in the unbroken helix

that spirals back

through countless generations of artists—

back to the gloaming wherein God said, Light!

Ansel’s photograph and his mentor

(black against white walls)

is a tribute (craft for craft)

and a legacy (eyes for eyes)

whereby each man defines,

each man revises

the dark and the daylight.