Dilation of feel

There’s a famous photograph by Ugo Mulas showing a picture by Michelangelo Pistoletto that reflects the viewer’s image. It’s a masterful shot consonant with the picture’s subject matter, a work of art itself and a difficult work at that precisely because it acts like a mirror. It’s a work whose photographic rendition requires some degree of manipulation to fully do justice to its meaning potential. How can the function of that blank area in the picture, and namely that of being a reflecting surface, be properly portrayed? How can it be photographed so as to avoid the area being perceived as merely blank, an empty space, a neutral background in the picture, instead of an area where new images are being conjured up all the time? How can it be explained that Maria – the artist’s wife whose portrait appears on the polished steel surface of the picture thanks to a technique which is itself photographic – symbolises “permanency”, while the blank surface on which the image of any object passing in front of the picture settles is in fact to be understood as a temporary roost for fleeting images, epitomising the transient world of the “here-and-now”?

Ugo Mulas responds to the challenge by putting himself in the picture. Camera and tripod, a head of curly, speckled hair are visible in the photographed picture, while the face is concealed behind the camera lens.

His shot of Pistoletto’s picture, then, shows him in the act of photographing it. Perhaps not directly identifiable, if not, thanks to the instruments of his trade, as the photographer taking the picture, he can nevertheless be justly satisfied by his achievement. He has in fact managed to elucidate on the presence of a reflecting surface in the picture and on the sense of a fixed image in that light-capturing surface.

In the offing, he has also revealed something of himself: for instance, his passion for technique, that is so embedded in a work of art as to not escape immediate perception. And yet method is what constitutes the work’s deep seated rationale and the key for anyone wanting to come to terms with it. In pursuing his interest in “how it’s done”, he spent months at a time in the lofts of such practitioners as, among others, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella. What was it that moved them, he wondered. How were their works born? He was posing these questions at a time, the 1960s, when these men were shattering the conventions of contemporary art and its relationship to American society. It was in this context that Mulas became the photographer of method, and not of style; of motive, and not of outcome; of the making of a work of art, and not of the work of art itself.

In other words, he was interested in photographing things that move along and are instantiated in time. The sort of time that allows for what Augustine calls the “distensio animi”, the broadening of sense and sensibility. Sometimes it’s long, sometimes short; sometimes it’s frantic, like the delay between shutter release pressing and firing when taking a photo in the self-timer mode and having to dash out in front of the camera to pose for the shot. It’s a common enough experience, especially when taking group photos and the camera owner doesn’t want to be left out of the picture.

For terminally ill patients aware of their condition, time moves on inexorably, in fast, long, strides. The best must be made of what time is left, as the illness relentlessly progresses.

One of the most touching pictures ever in the self-timer mode was once again shot by Ugo Mulas. It’s one of the photos in the “Verifiche” (Verifications) collection, which was begun shortly before his inspired career came to an abrupt end in March 1973 at forty-five years of age. In the picture we see the sharply focused image of his wife, Nini. But there’s also his own image in the picture, intentionally out of focus. Technically speaking, it’s a double exposure, but while the first shot was well focused, the second, his self-portrait, wasn’t. He seems to be suggesting that he is on the verge of fading out and aware of the fact, and yet also desiring to hold on, not wanting to depart from his beloved, sadly conscious that he will soon be only a mere recollection, a hazy intangible presence in her memory. The end was indeed in sight for him, as a living person and photographer. But Mulas seems to be also aware that not all is lost, that Nini will pick up from where his strictly physical and personal existence and practice leave off and carry them forward herself. She would continue being present in time; she would continue living and being in attendance, so to speak, of the world, a world in which photography has a reason for existing, even though it was a world he was about to depart from.

Then again, he may have wanted to tell us something less personal in that photo. Perhaps his message is that each of us has trouble putting our own persona into proper focus, while it seems easier for us to perceive others more clearly. At least their contours appear sharper to us, whereas of ourselves we only seem to be able to capture a fuzzy outline, a picture fading in and out all the time in the perennial process of fine tuning and self–definition. Or perhaps, in his natural reserve as a Sardinian expatriate living in Milan, that picture shot in the selftimer mode was simply meant to test out what photography is capable of, and, by extension, any other trade, profession or practice performed with passion.

After all, the final outcome of any process depends on what one puts into it, be it fire or fumes, flair or flaw. Indeed, sometimes flaws, especially those we’re willing to show others, may be intentional. And when that’s the case, they bear witness to even greater mastery.