Anima Mundi

For the longest time, humans have collected and sorted and organized entities to make sense of the world, whether physical or abstract ones. Not surprisingly, ever since it was invented photography has become an essential part of this endeavour: where pictures themselves aren’t the entities to be collected, sorted, and organized they have been produced to provides visual aids. This has become such an obvious facet of our daily lives that we don’t even realize its presence any longer.

By construction, photobooks are sorted and organized collections of photographs. Given that the purposes of most photobooks extend beyond this basic aspect, we hardly ever notice. And in many cases where that purpose does not extend any further, it usually becomes such an essential part of the work in question that there is no need to question it — or expect more.

For example, nobody in their right mind (well, we’ll come back to this) would expect a photobook by Bernd and Hilla Becher to be anything a very dry collection of monotonously photographed industrial installations. The point is exactly that: through the accumulation of things that look very similar (whether in real life or in photographs) their internal characteristics are exposed, and they are revealed as “anonymous sculptures”.

Of course, someone a little bit less enarmoured with art hierarchies might find the Bechers’ life work to be good but lacking, given that its understanding of the word “sculpture” is rather limited. Those collections do their job and, I’m told, a lot of people do not find them as dreadfully boring as I do. I don’t mean the good boredom, the one that opens the senses; I mean the kind of boredom you experience, say, when you have a long international flight, you barely got any sleep, and there are those 30 minutes to spend before the landing: your senses have become almost fully dulled.

I don’t mean to argue that the Bechers’ life work isn’t art; it’s just that I personally prefer art to take me to a point where I wonder “what if?”, where, in other words, I see the world anew — instead of marveling over some mundane details of a world that isn’t that exciting to begin with. (Your mileage might vary.)

Maybe it is my background in the sciences that has me ask artists for more than a mere collection of facts (let’s call it that). As a scientist, that’s what I was doing: collecting facts and coming to the only conclusions that were supported by those facts. There’s nothing wrong with that; but with time I found it wanting, especially since it put a limit on what I think of as my creativity.

Thus, now I want artists to get me more: as I already noted above, I want them to make me imagine something that’s not supported by the facts, or maybe something that’s supported by the facts albeit in a fashion that has me reconsider what I thought I knew.

It’s along these lines that Máté Bartha‘s Anima Mundi operates. Designed very attractively by Carel Fransen, the book is an exercise in making sense of the world through patterns either observed in it or placed onto it (design, of course, is information of visual material towards an end: communication).

Here, it mostly relies on a pattern of eight square-shaped boxes on each page, into which photographs are being filled. The individual photographs either fill a square, or they might fill a larger number. Where they fill four, they might be presented as four individual segments, or they are shown as a whole (but slightly smaller than the grid of four).

None of this would work if many of the photographs themselves did not depict patterns: the fragmentation of information serves to re-shuffle what is on view and its accumulation hints at a logic that might or might not be one we are not familiar with. I suppose this latter part strongly depends on who the viewer is; someone trained in the sciences might experience this book very differently than someone who is not.

(Which fact of course might make me the wrong person to write a review of this book. But now that I have started the job I will finish it.)

Without the inclusion of photographs of the human form, Anima Mundi would be a dreadful affair. Thankfully, there are quite a few of them, including a number of pictures of two hands used to form what might be symbols of some kind. Meaning, this says, is being communicated here and in what follows. What that meaning might be is up for the viewer to find out.

In many ways, you could view the book as a fairly representative example of a lot of work that is being made these days. It’s cerebral and very well made (I don’t mean “cerebral” as a criticism), and it talks about a bigger loose scheme while ignoring all the very concrete ones that surround us (and that I do mean as a criticism).

At some stage, photographers collectively will have to decide whether re-arranging the pixels of the deck chairs on the Titanic really passes the test of our times. Then again, Bartha lives under the Orbán regime in Hungary, so my comments are really directed at all those photographers who are still able to enjoy their civic and artistic freedom.

With that said, Anima Mundi certainly is one of the best recent photobooks that operates around the idea of (loosely) using the scientific method to make us re-consider the world. Looking through the book makes for an interesting experience: with some photographs, I felt that seeing them only in the grid made them lose some of their inherent value. But with others, it was the exact opposite.

Which only proves that when it comes to the photobook, the only thing that matters is the whole — and not the constituent parts. And that’s more or less the point of the book as well, even as it’s not announced what that whole might be: it’s up to the viewer to create it in their head.

Anima Mundi; photographs by Máté Bartha; essays by Emese Musci and Paul Dijstelberge; 136 pages; The Eriskay Connection; 2024

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One of the most underdiscussed aspects of photography is the role played by the way they look. Possibly, this is because photography was invented the wrong way around. In a perfect world, the first photographs would have been in colour, and they would have portrayed the world faithfully. With time, a select few photographers would have then introduced different approaches.

The first photographer to have produced black-and-white images no doubt would have faced a lot of backlash, but she would have insisted on the value of seeing the world in this fashion. Black and white would have slowly caught on, as more photographers would have started to understand what you can do when you remove colour from a picture.

Unfortunately, photography started out with the strangest of monochrome images — oddly disembodied specters floating on the surfaces of mirrors. Relatively shortly after, these got replaced with photographs on paper. But the presence of these life-like images — so different from anything produced before — had people mostly forget about their monochrome nature.

As more photographic materials became available (better lenses as much as different chemistries and types of paper), more options arose for the production of photographs. And there were some early discussions around what photographs ought to look like. Sadly, those neglected the medium at hand and, instead, circled around how or whether to place photography into the larger context of art.

Even as the photographs produced by, say, the pictorialists and the f64 group couldn’t look any more different, their underlying pre-occupation was identical: photography have to look a certain way. And this insistence concerning what photographs would have to look like would continue to this day, without a deeper understanding of what all of this might mean.

Once digital image-making tools came with filters — custom-made settings that allows for the instant creation of a specific look — the window closed fully: amateurs might have to rely on those cheap tools to make their photographs look a certain way. But we, the denizens of the exalted world of photography are doing so much better.

Well, are we?

What a photograph looks like mostly gets discussed in usually the crudest terms when it becomes extreme, such as when William Klein or Daido Moriyama embrace a form of black and white that pushes away all the midtones and, instead, settled for extremes.

Or when photographs look different enough in a fashion that they allow us to attach relatively shallow misconceptions to them, such as when Westerners try to connect Rinko Kawauchi’s photographs to their maker’s Japaneseness (“the Japanese see the world differently” — the form of Orientalism that still is so common).

The reality is that what a photograph looks like forms an integral part of how it reads. It’s important to understand the relationship between form (to use that term) and resulting interpretation. Especially when what a photograph looks like commands a lot of attention we should force ourselves to dive deeper — instead of staying on the easy surface (this is especially important given that we live under an attention economy that is being exploited by fascists for their nefarious ends).

I’ve spent so much time on the above simply because without a heightened awareness of this particular aspect of photography you’re likely to remain on that surface when looking at Magdalena Wywrot‘s Pestka.

Given our attention economy, it’s likely that you have seen some of the photographs already: it’s the kind of photography that, much like Moriyama’s, is great for online presentations: it’s bold, it’s (pardon the pun) flashy, it’s high contrast.

But you do the work a huge disservice if you remain at that level, because a relationship between a mother and a daughter (actually between any two people who are close) deserves to be seen with an eye for the many nuances entailed in a life shared that inevitably will enter the photographs.

Any person who becomes a parent experiences the parent-child relationship for the second time in their life. During the first time, they’re the child, and as they grow they start to fill out and form the their own personality that in part will be set up in opposition to their parents’. The second time around, the table has turned: now, there is another small person who goes through the same process.

It’s difficult to disentangle the former from the latter.

We don’t actually know to what extent what we see in the photographs in Pestka reflects the daughter’s personality. After all, she’s not the one who has her hand on the camera’s shutter button. We could try to make assumptions about the possible relationship between mother and daughter. But in all likelihood those assumptions would only reflect what we want to see — instead of what is actually there.

Alternatively, we could ask the people involved. I’m not interested in that, either, because whatever they might say closes off the work in very specific ways. The beauty of photography is not that it faithfully represents what its makers want it to do (if that’s all there were to it, it would be really boring). The beauty of photography is that it has the potential to make us feel something in unforeseeable ways.

I found myself drawn to mostly the least visually dramatic photographs in this book, because it was there that I felt I was getting glimpses of that independent mind in front of her mother’s camera. This is not to imply that Wywrot was doing anything wrong; it’s just that for me, portraiture lives from what a photographer cannot control.

In those photographs, I noticed a lot of seeing, a lot of different ways in which this young woman dealt with seeing and being seen. The innocence of looking (by which I mean a child’s not knowing that in social contexts, you can never just innocently look at something or someone) is slowly replaced by an awareness of the power of looking.

Looking means exercising a form of power, whereas being looked at does not.

The camera does that, too, of course, but it does it differently.

And it is exactly this growing awareness of looking, of seeing and being seen, that for me provides the intriguing red thread through this book that, alas, is a little bit too eager to sacrifice some of the work’s nuances for sheer spectacle. I just wish that there were more space in the book, that the edit would not try so hard to hit you over the head every time you turn the page.

“A sequence of photographs in a book is an invitation to imagine,” David Campany, the writer and curator (now Creative Director at ICP, that bastion of traditionalism in US photography), writes in the afterword of the book he edited. I wish he had followed his own advice.

After all, when photographs visually evoke the nervous energy of, say, William Klein’s pictures from New York, the temptation is to re-create that nervous energy. You can do that with Moriyama’s pictures, but I don’t think that you want to do it with Wywrot’s. Because sometimes, you have to resist such a temptation: for some photographs, such as the ones here, it only ends up closing off too many possible ways to approach them.

Thus, a viewer will have to do a little bit of extra work with the book to discover the many nuances in the work, some of whom are hidden away underneath a lot of spectacle. It’s work, but there are plenty of rewards.

Pestka; photographs and text by Magdalena Wywrot; text by David Campany; 149 pages; Deadbeat Club; 2024

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