F A R I S S U E N U M B E R 2 | А П Р И Л 2 0 1 1 | T H E E T E R N A L A N D T R A N S I E N T I N P H O T O G R A P H Y 1 . 6 8
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About the Eternal and Transient in Photography
The Eternal Number 1.68
Editor’s note
Nick Chaldakov
He is painting! He – the Dutchman Vincent van Gogh –
is painting
…
The portrait of God
himself!
At the end, joke-driven,
he said: Self-
portrait!
Hristo Fotev, “Etude II”
The one who achieves the eternal is the one who has the present and the future. He is in peace with himself and has God’s blessing, has found the meaning of life and has fulfilled the plan of the Creator.
What is eternal in photography is comparatively simple: it equals 1.68 – the number of the golden (God’s) ratio. The number of harmony and balance. When your composition is in harmony with 1.68, you are in balance with the Universe. Like the sculptures of Phidias (circa 480 BC – 430 BC). And the Fibonacci numbers.*
The Universe has been “created” from the number 1.68 and if some young enthusiast decides that the number 1.69 does not exist, then he has no chance of becoming a good photographer because the Universe will reject him. Get in harmony with the Universe, strive for being equal to 1.68. Take part in paneurhythmy, take pictures lightly and elegantly. Be yourself. You are the number 1.68. You are the creator and you again have invented 1.68 – don’t you remember?
The eternal is permanent and always the same. Can you improve Mozart’s harmony? Can Van Gogh get cheaper?
The same goes for photography. True photography is simple, always the same, easy. Easy, because it is done with no effort. The effort is for the diligent, the assiduous. The talented know how to do it. Now there are many who seek fame and are little talented because they do not know the number 1.68.
There are no recipes for talented photography, but there is a difference of millimetres in the composition, and the difference between good and bad photography lies exactly in these millimetres. It is precisely this few millimetres of a difference in the point of view that separate the true master from the amateur.
With this brief editor’s note, I would like to remind you that if you want to be good photographers it is good to be classics. To know what the number 1.68 means. Not to take it into your head that you can change the world and find something new. Nam proprium est nihil – “Nothing is your own property”. But also to find out that you are the creator who can create something new! Try to see what is common in the valuable pictures and to creatively interpret it in your own works.
Classics is not boring. Random modernism is. History remembers the boom of pop art and its brisk decline… But Van Gogh’s price is going up! Because he managed to separate the eternal from the transient.
Be a Van Gogh in photography!
* In 1202 Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci publishes an integer sequence, where each subsequent number – after 2 – is the sum of the previous two: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21… For example, Fibonacci’s sequence is represented by the following problem: A pair of rabbits (male and female) can produce for a unit of time (e.g. two months) a new pair of rabbits, which continue to breed – If nobody kills the rabbits, how many rabbits will there be? The answer lies in the last number of Fibonacci’s "rabbit" sequence.
There are a lot of objective laws observed in nature, human behaviour, architecture and art, which can be described using Fibonacci numbers.
F A R I S S U E N U M B E R # 2 | А P R I L 2 0 1 1 | S C E N T O F G A U G U I N
Y o u r n a v i g a t o r i n t o a r t p h o t o g r a p h y
р. 2
SCENT OF GAUGUIN
Plamen PACHEV, MD
The notorious and very expensive on the art market nowadays French painter Paul Gauguin may have never been in Varna. This is of no great importance. It is almost certain that in his art pursuits and in the course of his entire evolution as an artist, he either has no circumstantial relation to the art of photography, or if he has – it is very remote.
The notes on this painter, written in connection with a big exhibition abroad by our famous art critic Kalin Nikolov, however, provoke me to write the lines below, intended exactly to photographers or people who are tempted to go deep into the specific art of the photographer.
In fact, let us begin from the fact that the laws of art are the same for all. “Staking out a claim” or the obvious envy of the “trained” towards the “self-taught” has given rise to the myth of “professionalism” in some types of art. How can we explain then that things drawn by children, mentally-ill, created by “ordinary artisans” sometimes excite us more than the works of the “professionals”?
The truth is that there is rather no professionalism in art… There is artisticism and creative work!
If we over-fetishise "professionalism" as a banal notion, we will slip into giving too much meaning to the training to do the things in such a way as to make them acceptable without any formal objections from a handful of “initiated” people. As a rule, these “initiated” people are “protecting their bread”. They cannot stand that others can do things so convincingly, excitingly or in their own way, and “trump” them with the lack of “passwords” that come down to failing to observe certain rules. This might be valid in some rare cases – e.g. in sculpture, where a disproportionate head can upset the balance of the figure.
But is this rule always valid concerning music, poetry, painting? Apparently not quite.
The things are even more complex with highly technologised arts like the cinema and the photography, where one vision (one idea, respectively) may literally turn 180 degrees from a mild modification of the composition or the light. That’s why we have to refer to the understanding that in order to acknowledge an artistic success, we have to satisfy the functional purpose of a work of art.
By definition, art has or at least could also have the following three important functions – out of the many possible functions:
1. Form of sharing aesthetic thrills, social ideas, wide circle of worldly perceptions
2. A possibility to convince the others in a special and individualised manner, and with the corresponding expressive means, of things that you yourself are convinced about, or which have strongly impressed you
3. Possibly, a chance to “improve” the others – unostentatiously and by entering deep inside of you, as if tearing off your flesh, the flesh of a sensible person, in order to give parts of it away to the others – without selecting too much the “recipient”.
This means that a photographer, an artist-painter and a musician differ not so much in the “input” of their artistry in the work of art, but primarily in the expressive means by which this work of art has been created. For some these expressive means are the sounds of the musical instrument, for others – the photographic image that is the result of using the corresponding technology, and for some - the words, and still for others – the canvas and the paints, and so on.
In fact what does K. Nikolov “imply” in his article about Gauguin?
I will try to systemise the axioms (I consider important) of a creative work, which in the works of the Gauguin himself are so symbolic, so undisputable that no one would doubt the credibility of my example.
First rule – art may be intertwining of visualized reality and subjective perceptions to such a high extent that the borders of these two "territories" are often completely lost.
To put it simple, in one collaged, electronically processed photo work, the possibilities of subjectively ordering objects from the objective reality are so unlimited that it is sufficient to have an interesting idea or a sincere emotion in order to make millions of variants of a single message, which would be perceived correctly for those for whom the photographer has intended the message – regardless of its obvious phantasmagorical air.
Second rule – through his work of art the photographer can self-interpret himself in so many different and diverse roles as a demiurge of his message, that he could never come before audiences showing his true face - provisionally speaking of a man, a woman, a youngster, an old man, a “smiley” or an “angry” person.
Similar setting is rather actively defended by Nick Chaldakov in his visions of photo art and of the activities of the photographer as a creative artist. I simply agree with him on this, using the K. Nikolov’s statement that Gauguin simultaneously transforms into a sinner and into Christ in his self-portraits – depending on his current artistic feeling.
The third rule refers to the attachment of the true creative artist towards the mysterious and the unknown. With Gauguin this is more specifically the primitive way of life and culture of the aborigines in the remote Pacific islands. He personally finds originality and sincerity in these “subject-matters”. What is more, I do not forget that the surrealists in painting and photography, for example, used to find also the subconscious, shady sides of the man and the visualised reality.
The contemporary photo-advertising sometimes even misuses this option point-blank. Gauguin however looks for and finds the positive, reveals the “beautiful in the wild”. And this is a little bit more different than the situation where a photographer takes his self-portrait by all means only as a full-face photograph, because he is aware (from police pictures) that for a passport these photographs are made only as full-face photographs. And because his client expects to be photographed full face… Many decades ago, Rodchenko – looking namely for enough strange and unknown for their time foreshortenings – takes pictures of a pioneer with a trumpet from such an angle from below and aside that the work is today the pride of the several famous collections in the world that own it. If this rule has not been complied with, the famous Russian avant-gardist would have played with the light – let’s say, but would have made his trumpeter full face and with red scarf. To put it simple – an untraditional view when dealing with different photo works is recommended than the hope that we are not going to satisfy someone’s advance “spectator expectations” in a banal manner.
The forth rule is that it is commendable for an artistic photographer to be an “iconoclast”. This requirement directly corresponds to the previous rule. Probably the esteemed readers of FAR have heard the jocular interpretation of how to invent things, according to which everyone accepts something for granted.
Only a “crazy head” does not put up with this - it sits, thinks, draws - and all of a sudden the new is born. It is the optimal solution of an existing problem - one of a kind and particularly winning. What is curious is that when Gauguin exhibited in natural surrounding his naked figure, made of clay and covered in wax, he had been criticised by the priest. Of course the painter didn’t pay any attention to him. We all know what the creative artist’s attitude towards censorship is.
What is the connection between free creative work and scholasticism?! None – we would say.
As far as the liberal attitude of the local colonial police towards the work is concerned – God give all creative artists have luck with their censors – police of the spirit, however from a high-cultured land of traditions. The policemen in Gauguin’s paradise had been simply … French.
What I meant to say above is that a photographer should not be particularly impressed by the criticism of little-cultured, distrustful, tendentious or other unscrupulous "interpreters".
Fifth rule – it is advisable that a photographer directs his lens towards everything that stands still, moves, breathes or is in turns either a nice dream or a bad nightmare in his imagination. The world nowadays is integrated, computerised, telephonised – common for all of us and especially dynamic.
It is absolutely unlikely to nail or self-pledge a subject-matter, which is always interpreted with a maniac love, or declaring a certain style (one’s one or another’s) “authoritative, one and only, inimitable”. In the same way as we can now create hundreds of images on an electronic memory, so and the subject-matters of a photographer have to constantly change like the splinters of a kaleidoscope. Let us not forget the maxim that man is also Homo Ludens, i.e. “Playing man”. If, given the technical possibilities of contemporary photography equipment, we limit ourselves too much to something – subject-matter, approach, style, theme – we will ourselves “cut our wings”.
Sixth rule – we should not be moralising in our works. Gauguin has very categorically made the conclusion for himself – that God, i.e. the truth, is not the result of accounts, analyses and contemplations, but rather an exciting longing for dreamers, appreciators of the beauty, creative personalities.
Legend of foreign lands, 1902
Paul Gauguin
Of course, today this notion is considerably amortised by tendentious explanations and interpretations. That’s why I would recommend to any creative artist-photographer to look somewhere inside of him for this mystery called beauty, by trying (by means of the available photographic equipment) to rediscover, interpret and share it with his spectators.
I do not say that that in Nikolov's text there are only these settings, which I tried, a bit presumptuously and rather freely, to reformulate as photographic art guidelines. In any case, this creative work is as strictly individual, as the interpretation of the statements as regards this creative work is endless and multi-variant. I humbly beg the readers to accept that from what I have said about Gauguin, I am entitled to make such conclusions too…
This is the name of one of the most famous paintings of the notorious Paul Gauguin who turns the answers to these questions into the meaning of his life and work. It is a little known fact that Gauguin has visited Varna.
One exhibition, open exactly in the end of February this year, in the rooms of the National Gallery, Washington, presents one rather famous artist in a new light. In this case, Paul Gauguin is not just the next big painter and a curious man but he is also the first artist who creates myth or a sequence of myths where the irreal and the actual intertwine.
What is the painter drawing, what is the essence of the creator, where and how does the spirituality live, has there been a paradise on earth (or where can we find the lost paradise), why do the different religions intertwine in one and the same forms?...
Gauguin works in times when one communicates with the already not classical notions for civilization – one term absolutely smashed among the shadows of the modern city from the greed and the vice. Like a sailor from Rimbaud’s poem “The Drunken Boat”, he passes through the whirlpools of life led by one idea: „the man is a labyrinth, but somewhere inside of him hide the pure beginning and the simplicity in relationships”. Before him and his work, the art reflected the nature and moved foreword through the evolution of this reflection. Gauguin is the artist who undertakes the responsibility to be in the centre of movements that stem from the interest towards the wild and the primal, Buddhism and Hinduism, the non-classical springs in understanding Christian myths…
The creative rationalisation of the idea, the approach, the myth and the painter to mix their roles, is a conception developed by Gauguin in various ways – for instance with a series of self-portraits where his identity plays the role of a victim, prophet, sinner, and even Christ… In other variants – while still living in Breton (1888-1889), Gauguin accepts to depict the role of the primal myth, barbarically eternal and clear, sensory and effective.
Self-portrait, Paul Gauguin
Yellow Christ, 1889 Paul Gauguin
However, his art finds its big reincarnation among the islands in Oceania where his brush finds the world of the ancient cultures and the natural daughters of Eve. His paintings, however, are not just illustrations of the life seen on the islands, but are also considered to be the last evidence of a memory for the forms of life that is becoming extinct.
The major part of Paul Gauguin’s life does not pass in the atmosphere of studios but amongst the pressure of clerk desks and stock exchanges. Stock-broker and bank operations agent, somewhere deep in his heart his dream of leaving his labyrinth-like life of money and deals, burns more and more vividly. Europe, where all valuables are measured as if only through realised and return capital – “the kingdom of evil” – must be exchanged for some different opportunity! But does it exist? When the artist finds it, he would send the following description to his friends: “The silence at night here in Tahiti is still stranger than all the rest... The silence here is like a puff of the spirit. The natives often move bare-footed and tacit at night… I understand why these people can stay for hours, for days without uttering a word, and watch the sky with silent sadness. I sense how all this will captivate and appease me entirely. I feel that all the fuss of life in Europe does not exist any more, and that tomorrow, always, in Tahiti it will stay the same – until the end of the world…”
Or: “Once upon a time there lived people who strengthened their believes, but unlike us they had nothing to disturb them – the wear and tear of life and the paintings made for money… ”.
Horny fun, 1890 г.
Paul Gauguin
The chronicle of the revolt by which Gauguin wants to break up with his ordinary work, and with the chains of his family and the philistine daily round imposed as if from a matrix, is as follows: In 1890 he decides to go to Tahiti, in 1891 he sells out his paintings using the collected amount to leave France on 1 April and departs for the island of Tahiti. He settles down there in the settlement of Papeete, and then in Mataiea. In 1893, he has to return to France, but two years later he goes back to the places already mentioned. In 1901 he moves to the Marquesas islands and chooses a home on the island of Hiva Oa (Dominica). He calls his hut “The Merry Home”. In 1903, the local colonial authorities begin to see in the painter a subject who is dangerous for the local mores – the artist lies in prison for three months and pays a penalty. On 8th of May he dies of heart disease. Then the natives say “Paradise has ended!”
From the very beginning of the said dates, Gauguin shows interest towards the natives’ tales about the evil spirits Tupapau. In the tiny island horses and naked riders, he says he finds something really different from the Parthenon friezes. Regardless of his being surprised by the speed with which civilisation (from whose chains he has supposedly escaped) interferes in the paradise nooks of far Oceania, Paul Gauguin leaves a remarkable sequence of paintings, sculptures and graphics through which he reveals his aesthetic intentions. To draw the dawn of uncorrupted humankind, however, is hard to accept by the spectators. For example, here is what he says himself: “I place my sculptures all around the grass. Clay, covered in wax. First, a naked female body, then – a gorgeous lion from imagination playing with its little one. The natives who do not know these wild animals are absolutely astounded. The priest, for instance, made every endeavour to make me remove the naked woman… They laughed at him in the police, and I – I straightforwardly sent him to hell.”
Hello Maria, 1891
Paul Gauguin
Of course, the intention of the painter to undertake this complicated, difficult and dramatic adventure in the name of art, is a kind of philosophy. “The impenetrable secret stays the same as the one that has been, still is and will be – impenetrable to us. God does not belong to the scientific, the common-sensical. He is for the poets and the Dreamers. He is the symbol of Beauty, the Beauty itself.”
However, the desire to travel to the core of the epochs and the unblemished purity of the Beauty has many beginnings for Gauguin. One of them probably is when in 1868 the future painter embarks on the Jerome-Napoleon ship as a seaman, third degree. At that time he is only twenty, but his childhood has been richer (than a novel) of exciting, fantastic events.
His father is a journalist who has lives in the neighbourhood of the brave Eugene Delacroix, the leading painter of the Romantic school. His grandmother is Flora Tristan, famous (in her time) for being a participant in the proletarian propaganda fight for building a future society without exploitation and entitled to human life. Her husband, eaten by jealousy (jealousy from her love to Jesus, Buddha and the philosopher Furie) and because of her rebelliousness shoots her unsuccessfully. The case is followed through the press by all France. Flora Tristan was close to the emancipated George Sand. After her death, thankful workers from all over France collect money and raise a monument in her honour.
In 1848, the latest French revolution makes the social existence of the family unstable and they emigrate to unknown relatives in Peru. They are welcomed by people who have long ago renounced them due to the opinions of “naughty grandmother Tristan”, but are warmly host her descendants - something surprisingly different after the difficult ocean trip, during which, somewhere around Patagonia, Paul's father suddenly dies.
The rich Don Pio, in whose home they are accepted, is almost ninety, but this is barely visible because he is immensely rich and is one of the most wealthy people in the entire Latin America. He is taken into consideration by presidents, military men and politicians. This is how the future painter lives in a palace, filled with Indian ceramics, bearing prehistoric mysterious symbolism and among the paintings of the Spanish renaissance school, imposing the memory of the great Zurbaran and Velazquez , and perhaps even drawn by the very ones… Little Paul’s friends are Indian and negros, and the background of all their games is the exotic nature with beautiful colours and quaint animals. But the political reality in Peru, the turbulent coups and bloody fights for the government of the country put an end to the fairy experience. Paul Gauguin and his mother return to France again. The youth shows no desire to study and enrols as a sailor. But instead of the expected rigid discipline towards any such ship’s boy, the ships give even more freedom to the adolescent.
This is how Gauguin literary goes around the world once from his childhood years, and later also in marine uniform. The future painter even has the chance to travel with the modern (for its time, but mostly for its rank) imperial corvette “Jerome-Napoleon” – a luxurious yacht of four hundred and fifty horsepower, and a crew of a hundred and fifty. In fact, in order to work on it, Gauguin, who had already become second lieutenant before that, is re-hired this time as an ordinary seaman – coal carrier. It seams that despite all the adolescent demonstrates qualities in all things, because he is soon transferred to serve in the control cabin. As far as “Jerome-Napoleon” is concerned, in June 1868 it crosses the Mediterranean and between the two shores of Istanbul (once Leonardo himself proposed to the sultan to build a bridge in order to connect them) heads for the “Bulgarian port of Varna”, as the big explorer of the French culture, Henri Perruchot, puts it.
Port of Varna, 1908 г.
The fact that the town at that time is not a Bulgarian port is not arguable. However, and beyond all doubt, it is exactly Varna, more than any other Bulgarian town of the past, that enters the conscience of Europe with the vivid memories of an enslaved Christian people. The lithographs from the Russian-Turkish wars and the headquarters of the Emperor Nikolay as regards Turnatepe, as well as the paintings with the heroic death of Vladislav Varnenchik in battle with the troops of Murad are enough evidence for this. Before the eyes of Gauguin and the corvette’s crew, an interesting spectacle is revealed, a spectacle of the intertwined within each other two cultures – the oriental and the orthodox, which have their roots deeply braided in the ancient heritage of the remote past. For some this reality may be very distant for the face of the continent in those years. Gauguin is hardly surprised – has he not felt as a child in Peru the combination of different epochs and cultures? However for the moment everything that is before his eyes is more vivid than everything he has seen before…
The adolescent is silent by nature, but he goes off the deep end of a certain comment, which he thought unjust and humiliating - he shoves in the head of the ship’s non-commissioned officer in the pail of dirty water. Probably he never shares with anyone that he is trying to draw, which he defines as killing time for the time being… He is much too young in order to be much experienced in the opportunities presented by art. But it is exactly he from the personalities from the history of art who will see the diversity of the beauty and the many possibilities for it to be reached. If he could have the chance to also know the art work of the Bulgarian lands among the other nationalities in the Ottoman Empire, those fantastic icons with subject-matters from Bethlehem and the desert, with imaginary animals and symbolic people, with vivid, natural colours, Gauguin would have really encountered one of the springs of modern culture. Culture, among whose great builders is he himself… Perhaps the Bulgarian painter Bencho Obretenov quite rightfully says that “if it was possible for our art from the icons and the carts’ patterns not to pass through the grey academism and implausible etudes, it would have transferred right among the most significant parts of the new art spirit, of the most modernistic schools...”.
Two Tahitian Women, 1899 г.
Paul Gauguin
Actually, ever since his early childhood and throughout his adolescence Paul is accustomed to know the world not from geography textbooks but from real experience. He is not scared by the immense distances, which are often still unachievable at his time. He is also not afraid of the fact that the world is different in its different ends. He writes: “According to the legend, Inca – the first Indian was born from the Sun, and I will return there… I hope that I will be followed by all good hearts who have ever understood and respected me... A good world is coming, where the nature will follow its true path, the people will live under the sun and will know how to love each other”.
F A R I S S U E N U M B E R # 2 | A P R I L 2 0 1 1 | T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R A L E X A N D E R I V A N O V
Y o u r n a v i g a t o r i n t o a r t p h o t o g r a p h y
р. 4
The Photographer Alexander Ivanov
The Landscape – A Taboo Subject
Nick Chaldakov
I teach my students not to make photos of landscapes because the landscape is the most photographed subject. There are millions of variants of landscape photographs, many of which have reached certain heights in composition and lighting. There are big masters of the landscape and before shooting a landscape I tell my students to better see the already photographed ones... www.google.com
I teach my students to photograph a landscape only if they have something new to show to the world, something different from the already seen!
And this is hard… Hristo Fotev wrote “Landscape of words” – and this is enough for the landscape. So, please, I beg you, do not photograph landscapes!
There are only two exceptions where this is allowed:
1. If the photographer studies how to take pictures. The landscape is an excellent material to work with the foreground, the composition and the lighting, free to all and difficult to photograph.
2. If you have the feeling that you will show something incredibly new as vision, and when you show it and make an impression not in facebook but in some international gallery, you can be a little more relaxed that you have had the right feeling.
Before photographing a landscape, consider who needs your landscape? If it is only you who needs it – please, do not publish it online – there are thousands such photographs over there...
The Landscape of Alexander Ivanov from Kazanlak
Nick Chaldakov
“The things that surround us are as they are. I do not want to make them neither more beautiful nor uglier. I want to show them the way they have impressed me.”
“I do not deceive myself that my photographs and my thoughts are the greatest. There is no such thing. They are just mine. I do not imitate this or that one.” Alexander Ivanov
360 degrees, 9 years, 200 hours of flight, 120 photographs selected out of 10,000 frames
To be born and to live in Kazanlak is diagnosed as being a “landscape artist”! And the photographers from Kazanlak confirm this diagnose. I was happy to be in the radiant surroundings of this group in those years when photographs were copied manually and the pictures were black-and-white. You look at them, and they speak to you gently, playfully, lively.
Alexander Ivanov, a wonderful man and an excellent photographer-landscape artist, is also a masterly copy-maker of black-and-white photographs. At that time (circa the year 2000, about which my father used to tell me, when I was little, that we will go to space) I used to copy my black-and-white photographs in the laboratory of Alexander in Kazanlak. It was namely these photographs that were stolen a year later from an American gallery, thanks to which incident I became a popular photographer in Bulgaria, too.
I owe Alexander much – he introduced me on the Bulgarian art stage, up until then I used to send photos only to the USA and England. What a farce – to become famous not with your photographs but with their stealing - this explains why the world is such a morally degraded place. (In the classification of the universal civilisations we rank last, a little bit before or after animals, because if one civilisation has lawyers, prosecutors and judges, it is morally degraded.)
But let’s go back to Master Alexander Ivanov and those romantic years of photographic art in Kazanlak. Evening, local pub, a group of photographers from Kazanlak, I and Alexander – over bottles of wine, we talk about art photography and about how one can become internationally famous – “naturally” I used to say… and I was right.
While Sasho was humble and humble did he stay, he was talented and talented did he stay! He flew up high in photography – literally and figuratively. In order to improve the point of view, to make “his landscape”, as he likes to put it, Alexander went on a hang glider and photographed Bulgaria from high up. This is typical for his spirit – raised above worldly matters, looking towards the beautiful and the harmonic, Alexander Ivanov continues his flight in the visual realities and dreams. He cannot be classified because this would be as if to cut his wings, which he uses to fly in the sky of the spiritual. There he creates photographs that stand out from most of the landscapes around the world. And I remained Nick from Bourgas and Varna, famous…for his stolen paintings, copied from Alexander Ivanov from Kazanlak.
Words are unnecessary – see him, study him, live him…now.
ALEXANDER IVANOV TAKES PICTURES FROM ABOVE AND SEES FAR BENEATH
Plamen Pachev, MD
I will confess that the works of this very interesting Bulgarian photographer really impressed me at the time when he had exhibited to the eyes of all on the crooked “Lovers’ bridge” in front of the National Palace of Culture in the capital, and then on the old market in Plovdiv.
Yes, there is nothing new in wandering off in the air and to take more and more pictures.
In 1863 the Parisian Felix Nadar even broke his bones with the especially built by him balloon Le Geant in order to take photos from the air and then publish his impressions on the emerging aerial photography.
Nowadays we are satiated with aerial pictures from foreigners. Furthermore, several awards for artistic interpretation of aerial landscape have already been given in our country, too. The foreigners impressively photograph most often castles, natural miracles in far-away countries, the urban areas of symbolic European capitals. And our fellow countrymen – the salt mines of Pomorie. But in order to render your homeland in such a detail and so excitingly from the air, in order to feel the beauty of this ancient land, without being naturally irritated from the hundreds of plastic bags around and from the traces of human negligence – only Alexander Ivanov has managed to achieve this so far in our country and in an artistically plausible way.
In fact, people say “One sees the tree, but not the forest”. And it is as if Ivanov had removed the tree and had wandered off somewhere “above” to take a look at the forest, while everyone else “down” “makes money” and behaves like a scoundrel (or just “as the tradition has it” is being lazy, whining and fussy). He had skilfully “snapped” whatever had come into his eyesight and had said: “Here it is – Bulgaria from 360 degrees!”
I repeat – today aerial pictures are wish-wash. Most often, they are taken to make money and impress the spectator. I was also impressed how beautiful Nessebar may be, seen from above, how different the rape in bloom or the lavender looks from the air, what fairy shadows play on the rocks in Belogradchik… Even I, full of malicious joy, noticed that he, too, has found himself “sponsors” without ever thinking that someday the flying photographer may flop down from the vaults of heaven and stay only in the memories of the ones who loved him and, of course, of the ones who hated him.
When Nick, or rather the artist Nick (as he is called in London) offered me to write about this photographer in order to introduce him in FAR, I routinely glanced through Ivanov’s website, got a general impression from most of this artist’s creative work and automatically started to read one of his interviews online. And a good thing I did that because it took my breath away…
Dear Alexander, I do not personally know you and I will not praise you. Others will do it better than me, and most will also try to “shake your hand” – in the forums, personally at your exhibitions, you will even be paid by the ones who will use for their own ends your wonderful photo-pictures. It is up to me to only summarise for the others your words in that interview, to interfere as a “black station” in the virtual space in order to assure the readers of FAR that you are on the right path.....
1. “Sasho – the American”
It is not very characteristic of the Bulgarian to study for an engineer-chemist (and that is at a time when there were lots of well-paid and respected career offers for this profession), and then to get tempted by a “Baireta” and turn photography into his hobby, destiny, profession and life. Lately, we have seen enough of how people modulate in the very broad (almost philosophical) sense of the notion – politicians, party dodgers and people, who are oppressed by penury.
And only the people free in spirit dare to devote to what excites them existentially. Obviously, the engineer from Kazanlak is some sort of a more peculiar breed of a man with free spirit.
Most of us are different… In our country, there was only this one old movie where they showed how a certain drunkard dared to tell another drunkard that of he loved someone, he should dump everything and give himself up to his love. This is why most of us are not used to emotional devotion but to banal cheating. This is also why we often substitute love for sex.
Yes, Alexander Ivanov is a free man. We’ve been suggested that so are the Americans. I like that they are business-like and know a bargain. And that they surrender to their emotions to the end… However, not all of them – only the chosen ones.
2. Sasho – the Tireless
Ivanov flies off in the air with his camera aged 50. At this age the people usually thermo-insulate their homes and change their cars. To wander off in the sky and look at the world through the lens from a different angle – this is the fortune of the questing artists. And these are not many – neither abroad, nor in Bulgaria.
Czech photographer Josef Sudek (1896-1976) is a classic – but until the end of his life he uses an archaic full frame camera and that is predominantly in his favourite garden in Prague. And now, the young billionaire Petr Kellner has collected a major part of these photographs.
Sam Haskins (1926-2009) also frequently bothers his daughter’s college girls and has become a symbolic photographer of the naked body. He reveals that in order to choose one single successful photograph out of his divine pictures, he uses the frames of 5-6 films…
Sasho also confesses to have created 120 felicitous photos for the abovementioned cult exhibition of his after 200 hours of flying. NB – this happens when he is 50 years old, and he achieves this „на перки”, i.e. he himself has paid for it, it has not been obligatory for him to do it because he is already an established artist with many awards and successes in the genres he has worked so far. And he does this ALONE – unlike the French Yann Bertrand, for whom numerous crews work, and companies like “Fuji” and “Air France” pay…
May this photographer of ours go on working until he is beyond 80, which is true for the professors in Japan, which they say lived to an honourable work age due to the fact that they charged with energy from their students…
3. Sasho – the Humble
Alexander Ivanov is a very good photographer. In the last years and from the air, however, He publicly declares that his photographs and his thoughts were not “the greatest”. Ivanov, please, come to your senses! In this state we are all great, genius; we are all even made to be prime ministers. Any politician coming from some shady village from Targovishte does not shy away from putting himself on the same footing as Charles de Gaulle or, at least, Putin. And the Television invites you to photograph a flood with your mobile phone and get shown on “First National”.
It is true – everyone wishes that his children and grandchildren live in clean natural environment – but only you say it in public. And at that – without being “great”.
4. "The Truth" about Sasho
Alexander Ivanov confesses that true photography is like love. This is a beautiful symbol for every creative activity, but often reality is flat and grey. Every man of art compares his motives with this imaginary, often sick state of the individual, which psychologists describe with the collective term “falling in love”. As far as feelings are concerned, it is also an inexplicable longing, an inclination to compromises, but also something ever changing and slipping through our fingers – as water in the spring and life around.
This is why most people consider that being in love for a long time means that you are some kind of a “half-witted lucky man”. The more time passes, the more the dementia of the people truly in love begins to prevail over the happiness. Because – opposite to the popular opinion – only the happiness is individual…
If love is the correct common known for a daily and difficult photo activity with changing creative success, this means that it has predominantly emotion, faith, ideal – all things outside “the craft”. And how many artists can brag about such a “professional half-wittedness”. Again only few…
Alexander Ivanov is obviously such a person – if he is not embarrassed to confess it at 62. In fact, I understand well the motif of his unconditionality. There are some critics in our country – blatantly famous at that – who have tried to persuade him that the good photograph is the one which has been described, classified and “fussed about”. I want to be permitted, as a person who has spent more time abroad than the critic in question, as well as than Sasho himself, to only mention that what I refer to here is the mass culture. There, there are marketing tricks that are applied in order to make you foot the bill. Ortega y Gasset himself has said it: “A person has no thoughts – they have to be “entered” in his head – just as the oil in the machine”. And Ivanov’s photo-pictures are a long way off the cliches of mass culture.
Take-home message
Alexander Ivanov has found in the clouds something that is innate to the very essence of creative photography, to the very blood of true artists.
Lightly paraphrased, it sounds like this: “The good picture has a soul. Man takes it, when he is “as if” looking around, while in fact he is gazing at himself. This is the difficult……”
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