Richard Ford
Text for the book Goddess, 2015
Claes Oldenburg once wrote that distinctions between media constitute a “civilized disease.” We can argue about whether photographs are media – whether they’re the message or the messenger. But Oldenburg’s remark suggests that he considered human urges to represent experience and convey its density to be emanations from a common urge. An artistic urge – in some, at least. It’s not a surprise, then – to me in particular – that a great photograph should seem in some ways like a novel, in that a great photograph is never “about” anything less than everything in its frame. Middlemarch is, thus, not a novel about Dorothea Brooke; it’s a novel about everything between its covers.
This estimation is especially pertinent when we look at landscape photographs – my favorite of all photographs, both for the technical difficulties they pose for their makers (how do you frame things when the earth just goes on and on?), and for their conspicuous achievement when a photograph works: limitless space formalized into a subject, with its limitlessness left intact and rendered arresting, even beautiful.
Part of the exhilaration of looking at a superb photograph of landscape is to have one’s eye and mind set free to take in the whole image; pleasurably to suppress the urge to choose some detail within the picture as its putative subject – a bridge, a riverbank bazaar, men on a sand bar, some dogs devouring a carcass, a bicycle. Such choosing makes the photograph be less than it would be, deprives us of experiencing the artist’s inclusiveness – the bigness of his or her vision.
In one sense, a landscape photograph, whether by Ansel Adams or Eliot Porter or Jed Devine or Alec Soth is a depiction of space, with all the possibilities and perils that such an undertaking foretells. Provisionally, at least, everything that populates the frame in a landscape photograph – El Capitan, a wooded island shore in Maine, a shack along the Mississippi River in winter – serves as an exponent to all that surrounds it, even if these interior elements seem to dominate the space and claim precedence.
Goddess, the present forty-eight photographs which Caleb Cain Marcus took along the Ganges River, offers – as Cain Marcus writes – a glimpse “…of ephemeral moments when space can be seen and felt in landscape….” To Cain Marcus, “Space has substance, weight, quality and presence. Space connects people, land, rivers, oceans, mountains, animals, gods, goddesses and the firmament….” Space, to him is – at least partly – transitive. It has a use and an outcome. Although it is more than that, too.
What this belief about space determines in Cain Marcus’s photographs is often an aesthetic and a photographic and visual vocabulary that subjects the viewer to a supreme intensity of notice (people, land, animals, are all visible and connected), yet one induced by an often evanescent consideration of detail. Much is seen in these photographs from a specifics-blurring distance, and sometimes from a height. Much is seen through fog. Light is often manipulated so as to appear fainter than we suspect it naturally was when the photograph was taken. And sometimes light seems simply inadequate for what would be a conventional picture. All of these diverse effects, in one photograph or another cause everything in every frame to be enticingly, visually, sometimes mysteriously in play. The photographs invite us to search them, so that each image seems to expandas we view it, and by that expansion admits us to the extensiveness of land and space – one of the moral positives these pictures imply. Cain Marcus refers to this complex effect as poetic, and of making us see the normally unseen. To me, it’s an equally magical matter of what the poet Paul Elouard meant when he wrote, “There is another world but it is in this one.”
Matters of poetry aside, Cain Marcus’s photographs are also ravishingly beautiful, fairly direct renderings of land forms, river channels, mud flats, hay stacks, humans in their daily routines – all denoting not only their selves, but also the wide space they occupy and their proportionate significance in it. (In other words, all those details I’m so nervous will steal the show as surrogate subjects, vitiating each individual photograph’s generously inclusive vision and spirit; this is the something moreI mentioned earlier).
Fog, as noted, is often a feature in the photographs – standing-in stilly for the air we otherwise wouldn’t see, and also revealing, then concealing, distant shapes of habitation and human industry. Fog as a source of visual interest lengthens and diffuses and makes sensuous our gaze, but also sharpens it and promises us that there’s more here that we can make out if we will just pay attention, thus rendering the world and our experience in it more bounteous, more worthy of our notice. Unexpectedly, fog also becomes a moral as well as an aesthetic dimension.
The holy river itself – the Ganges, Ganga – is often languorously in the picture. But not always – though it’s always present. We know the river is a deity to Hindus and others, and likewise a vehicle to heaven, a panacea, an elixir, a lifeline to agriculture and a generalized force for most anything good that needs furtherance. In Cain Marcus’s remarkable pictures there is a palpable certainty that no matter what we may see that isn’t specifically the river, the river still influences everything, and nothing would be here without it. Indeed, much of these photographs’ feeling of importance and immanence originates in the river, and speaks to the river’s own considerable psychic and literal space.
Landscape photography, I sometimes think of as portraiture – portraiture of earth and space, with conventional portraiture’s concerted attention not to persona, but to terrestrial contours and shapes, reflective surfaces and delvings, outlines, densities, seemingly-empty lengths and widths. We can all fantasize about who Abraham Lincoln was when we gaze at the complex integrity of Byers’ famous portrait from 1858. But in truth we learn little of the President from his picture. We’re invited, instead, to see Lincoln, not to know him – as if seeing were an important and difficult enough moral task. Avedon wrote famously about portraiture that it is “performance.” “…[A] portrait is not a likeness,” he said about his own work. “The moment…a fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. All photographs are accurate, none of them is the truth.” This dictum seems apt to the photographs that are here. Not only do Cain Marcus’s images radiate both a serene, not-undramatic, somewhat dis-affiliating stillness found often in portraiture, but they also are unquestionably performances meant to create an effect and elicit a response in us that intensifies seeing rather than knowing. No one would say these photographs don’t honor and do vivid obedience to the great river and its abounding spaces and humans. But this is not documentary work. Its palette, colors, its intense purposefulness with light tell us that, as does the way in which all the photographs seem uncannily larger than they are.
Cain Marcus has much to say about color and light elsewhere in this book. But what he calls, there, his “dialogue with color” – evident in his photographs – signifies that his intention is to act on the landscape he points his camera toward, not simply record it or to study, reveal or capture it. Using his camera, he wishes to do what poetry does to experience: transform it and make objects that are sufficient unto themselves and un-paraphrase-able, and by such transformings cause us to see the other world that is in this one.
Once, a few years ago, I visited the Metropolitan in New York to take in a photographic exhibit called “Framing a Century” – seminal work by masters of photography’s first hundred years – Le Gray, Atget, Brassai, Julia Margaret Cameron, Walker Evans, Man Ray. A wealth of genius. A week later I was in Paris and happened to read in the now-departed Herald Tribune some good thoughts about the exhibit I’d just seen, written by the critic Roberta Smith. Smith wrote – about the artists in whose images I’d so recently luxuriated – that they “…all used the camera to find bigness in themselves, in the new medium, and, above all, in the world….” These words – so unfussily plain-spoken and purely meant – stayed with me and have found use in helping voice admiration for work that arrests me: art and artists that look for “bigness,” and for commensurate ways to imagine it newly. As I’ve just said, one can’t paraphrase, sum up or build neat boxes around these wondrous photographs by Caleb Cain Marcus. They are too various, too surprising, too nuanced for justice to be done with words. Nothing, therefore, seems more right than to say that as an artist Cain Marcus seeks bigness in the world, and employs his search to help us find it as well – photographic glimpses that confirm and delight in the imagination’s possibilities, and that measure up to the world’s spacious wonders.