Anton Kusters
May 08, 2016 @ 10:45 EST
Dear Anton,
I’ve been thinking recently about a person I traveled with some years ago, on buses and old turboprops around Kazakhstan. It was January and we traveled for several weeks, and in my memory we were never able to get warm. She was blind, or nearly so. Her eyes had no lenses; she could see only light and shadow. She carried a small magnifying glass and with this she was able to focus on shapes. She had acquired the magnifier as an adult, and was learning to understand what she was seeing image by image. For instance, she was able to see photos of her daughter, but could not read the expressions on her face. She carried those photos everywhere, and showed them to people we met, taking on faith that her daughter was cheerful and smiling in the pictures. During the time that we traveled together, to Shymkent, Aktau, Pavlodar, Semipalatinsk and other cities in Kazakhstan, along icy roads and in long, cold waits in bus stations and airports, we explored the difference between icicles and lamp posts, lamp posts and radio towers, streetlights and the full moon.
#image_by_image is an ongoing conversation between photographers Ivan Sigal and Anton Kusters.
@ivansigal @antonkusters on Instagram
May 26, 2016 @ 14:05 CET
Dear Ivan,
I’m obsessed with context. Saw your image yesterday, and all I could think was “what if this woman were the one who could actually see?” I know, having all of humanity stacked up against you makes it nearly impossible to be considered the norm for correct seeing. And what is ‘the norm’, besides a product of specific set of circumstances.
All I remember when young was trying to understand why, trying to turn things around, trying not to judge, and slowly realising that everyone can only look through their own eyes. Perhaps realising the inevitability of one’s own context is the most I could hope for.
It makes me wish I could see like the woman in your photo, constantly dependent on others to interpret, something we all seem to shun. Her act of seeing and seeking context being so much richer than mine, petty, arrogant, rusted and willing only to believe my own.
#image_by_image is an ongoing conversation between photographers Ivan Sigal and Anton Kusters.
@ivansigal @antonkusters on Instagram
May 27, 2016 @ 8:30 EST
Dear Anton,
Once we have learned to see shapes, it is most difficult to unsee them. In your image I struggle to interpret two black dots as anything but eyes, and the shadowed slit as a mouth.
During those cold travels with E (I’ll call her E), we discussed sight in its many permutations, as both an aid and impediment to understanding, as desire, as pain, as memory, as illusion. We spoke of the design of cities and towns, where one could live without eyes and where one was rendered captive by the construction of buildings and streets, the availability of public transport, of sidewalks, of neighborhood shops and services. E mentioned that she lived in Russia because the cities could be navigated without sight. She lived in Yekaterinburg I believe, a city with a compact core, but she had come from a suburb, where she was utterly dependent on others for movement.
We tried to find words to describe depth perception, how to interpret shape and form, what an image might be to someone for whom image is abstraction. We tried to find language that would approximate visual experience – composition, space and time, movement through a seen world.
E described her perfect work of art as an image that exactly fit her field of vision, spreading over the visible until it covered everything, a screen, a sky, a color field. Her idea of making a work of art was based on the capacity for sight afforded by her lensless eye. She was struck by the idea of colors on a single plane, and their alteration. Which tells me, now, that even though her instrument for seeing is different than ours, her impulse to shape with that instrument is the same.
#image_by_image is an ongoing conversation between photographers Ivan Sigal and Anton Kusters.
@ivansigal @antonkusters on Instagram
May 29, 2016 @ 13:32 CET
Dear Ivan,
Navigating without seeing is like life: we don’t have the capacity to see where we’re actually going, even though we can sometimes understand a broader picture. In E, I see a metaphor: as with your image of people walking with umbrellas, we’re constantly navigating with seemingly little context, sunk away in thoughts with never a clue, scarcely learning to recognise shapes along the way. Our strength is that we’re not alone. E seems to understand that more than most.
In a comparable way, for the last years I’ve been making images without a lens, asking a camera to record images for me with an eye that I do not have myself. Nothing between reality and medium, everything reduced to two-dimensional recorded shapes that I retroactively try to understand while relating to the moment I experienced.
And then there are those moments when I suddenly find myself in a tree along my path, which I’ve apparently climbed to seek out a horizon. Hoping to be closer. But that’s the thing about a horizon: it’s hope. It’s meant to be far. Of course I’ll never arrive. The fact that my hope defines a path in ways I cannot understand is kind of OK. When in doubt, I just need to turn around and look back where I was yesterday.
Out of nowhere, a dog gently approaches me, acknowledging and accepting my presence.
#image_by_image is an ongoing conversation between photographers Ivan Sigal and Anton Kusters.
@ivansigal @antonkusters on Instagram
May 30, 2016 @ 08:38 EST
Dear Anton,
You speak of hope, but as I think about what you’re saying, it’s endurance that comes to mind. How you found yourself in that tree might be a mystery, but I can imagine you up there, squinting through branches. It was early spring, the ground was wet and terrain flat. Maybe you felt a little bit exposed. What I want to know is, once you were there, did you find what you thought you wanted? Or was what you found the image you then desired? Your animal, its flicked tail, a monumental shadow with confounding, spindly legs. If it were sculpture it would be made of mottled iron.
You start on a journey or a route of exploration, perhaps full of hope and detailed plans, perhaps unsure but acting anyway. You take one step, then another. Soon you’ve created a way of working, and a after a little while you feel as if you’ve always been that way. How do you ask whether it’s still what you need? Emotions come and go, it’s hard to get out of bed before sunset to capture a certain light. You might travel for days towards a particular atmosphere, enduring the tedium of the road and plenty of time to wonder whether you’re being clever or just bloodyminded. You go on anyway. Maybe you’ve created a program and it’s easier to follow it. Maybe back just isn’t an option, or a diversion elsewhere feels unmoored. Later you might find something you need in the the image you made, or the task you accomplished. Is it the image that has value? Does it seem to allude to something else? Or is it a marker for the journey, perhaps for the time you spent in that tree?
#image_by_image is an ongoing conversation between photographers Ivan Sigal and Anton Kusters.
@ivansigal @antonkusters on Instagram
June 01, 2016 @ 12:49 CET
Dear Ivan,
How I get into that tree is indeed a mystery, most of all to myself… but I’m fine with that, as long as it keeps on happening. Looking out, I find little more than a vague hint in the distance, and there need not be more. These few seconds of squinting, looking forward and back at the same time, maybe seeing, mostly not seeing. Simply being allowed to be there.
Two years ago I was a dog. Then I climbed a tree and saw that the images I’d been making for years weren’t connected to what I had set out to talk about. It was agonising. I had lost my words. I had to learn to navigate my own images all over again.
So I touch wood and get the courage to jump. “Unsure but acting anyway” is a very apt description. I am somehow able to move past the barriers that I create for myself. Yet I can only see that later. Is it instinct? Even though I make mistakes all the time, this feeling hasn’t failed me yet.
It’s like your detail of the wall: I know it’s a detail and I am content knowing that I might never be able to see the entire wall. I can climb it, and along the way I’ll only be able to look closely at the details in front of me. The only certainty is that I know there’s a wall, and that I’m moving. I might not ever reach anything.
Do you have this little thing inside that makes you jump, this little thing not caring how your life looks or if you’re unsure? Are you unsure at all? Maybe you’re sure. I’ve met many who are, maybe most. Or maybe you’ve mastered tree climbing, and were able to build a little home up there.
You know, with a cosy fireplace and a tea kettle.
#image_by_image is an ongoing conversation between photographers Ivan Sigal and Anton Kusters.
@ivansigal @antonkusters on Instagram
June 02, 2016 @ 09:28 EST
Dear Anton,
In the fair city that I currently inhabit, in early summer, a high canopy of trees conceals row houses, bamboo creeps under fences, English ivy over walls. The broad leaves of fig and hosta turn upward to catch the rain. Mornings the streets are skeined with movement. Boys and girls, hair still damp and shiny, rush to catch the bus to work or school. On the buses something seems to gather out of the collective health and cleanliness of the passengers, a sort of eagerness for the day that is given to the prosperous.
We know, of course, that appearances are illusory. I won’t dwell on the many ways rouge can disguise a bruise, or paint conceal rot. Instead it is the density of objects in space I want to point to, how a busy streetscape asks us to pick out geometries and details, to project dramas upon those passing by. There is nothing sparse in this vision; there is no horizon line.
When I sat down to write this morning I intended to respond to your question of surety. As you put it, acting without caring for consequence. Instead I’ve been led astray by another question, the one implicit in your image of the undercarriage of branches.
#image_by_image is an ongoing conversation between photographers Ivan Sigal and Anton Kusters.
@ivansigal @antonkusters on Instagram
June 04, 2016 @ 10:03 CET
Dear Ivan,
I agree, and I think you make an important observation with “the act of projecting upon”. Often we forget, as image makers, that there is a necessary second moment of interpretation, by definition out of our control. The first interpretation is obviously that of the photographer making the image, the second that of viewers interpreting that same image, an image that they can never fully contextualise.
I find myself – as a viewer – always wondering about that first interpretation, what drove the decision to make this image in this exact way. Of course I’ll never be able to know this, so I project, not only my reality upon the photograph, but also my reality upon what might have been the first interpretation of the artist.
The fig leaf of course forever being in the way, making it impossible for me to see, leaving me with my projection. And at the same time most probably protecting me from disillusion were I able to understand.
Why disillusion? Because not understanding is the most powerful drive. It pushes us to jump, to experience, to learn. The last Homo Universalis died a long time ago, but I can’t help wondering what he felt at that precise moment when he had pushed all fig leaves aside and said to himself “and now I know everything there is to be known”. I doubt it was joy.
As a human being I’m a social creature. I absolutely need to be in this constant state of projection, relating to other humans around me any chance I get, dependent on the other even in my act of being alone, instinctively pushed forward by my will to understand; my lensless eye, my umbrella.
Just like a dog, I am never lost, only walking to be found. You?
#image_by_image is an ongoing conversation between photographers Ivan Sigal and Anton Kusters.
@ivansigal @antonkusters on Instagram
June 06, 2016 @ 04:29 EST
Dear Anton,
A few weeks ago I was visiting a friend in rural Pennsylvania, not far from where I grew up. He had an old red Alfa Romeo convertible that he rarely drove. I opened a door to a shed where it was stored, the indraft of new air stirring motes of dust, of the scent of rodents and rest. The car was wrapped in a heavy, pale cover and partly obscured by boxes and lawn furniture stacked upon it. The last time I drove it was more than five years ago, with my father.
Our home movies, when I was a child, were shot on 8mm film and projected in the living room. We set up a portable screen or maybe we cast the images on a wall. The film canisters were robin blue and we wrote the date and subject on them with black permanent marker. While I’m sure those films covered the usual range of family activities – picnics, camping, sandcastles by the seashore, sturdy, stubborn children, the only images I recall now are of machines and movement – of me driving a tricycle again and again into a wall, or my father racing his rare yellow Porsche Elva up hills and around race tracks.
I should clarify. When I say I recall, what I actually mean is that there is a flickering in my mind of an image on the wall, and particular gestures. The wave of a hand, a flashed smile, the moment of impact and a child’s jerking head. The other details may not exist, at least not on film. Such as the time my father drove his car into a tree because his brakes had failed. In my mind I witnessed that accident. I can still see it.
As I’ve written this, casting about for more fragments of image, I’ve been fighting a sense of alarm and confusion. I’ve been mislead by the indistinct form of your shrouded vehicle. I’ve never driven my friend’s convertible, up and down the steep, shaded Pennsylvania hills, the narrow carriage roads and farm tracks, the lean of our bodies as we spiraled down into ravines, the rush of speed and flickering shadow.
#image_by_image is an ongoing conversation between photographers Ivan Sigal and Anton Kusters.
@ivansigal @antonkusters on Instagram
June 11, 2016 @ 14:41 CET
Dear Ivan,
In Rome where I am now, a city with a huge past, carved and set in stone by uncountable columns, history has been redefined many times. An act of blurring in and of itself, like the tarp covering the car, never revealing its entirety, only showing every viewer what they want to see, relying on imagination and memory of what is obscured. And I’m sure that images in our collective consciousness cloud our own memories as well, often passing for one of them to the point we believe them to be our own.
I must confess that I’ve never driven a convertible. I can imagine the feeling being comparable to riding a motorcycle on winding roads, sun setting, wind blowing, no destination. After three accidents it was time to move on.
Walking down the steps of my friend’s room here in via Casalini I look outside and see a baby doll and tricycle left behind on the neighbour’s rooftop. A mix of thoughts, memories and associations come to me, and now I long for my innocence and earliest childhood, playing around our house in Riyadh.
I’m on a tram heading to Termini and a little girl points to an imaginary place out the window. Again, constant movement, constant remembering, forgetting, appropriating, redefining, moving towards, and moving away.
#image_by_image is an ongoing conversation between photographers Ivan Sigal and Anton Kusters.
@ivansigal @antonkusters on Instagram