Feco Hamburger and The Long Time
In the 2004 individual exhibition presented at the Pinacoteca do Estado, entitled “Noites em claro” (Sleepless Nights/Bright-eyed Nights), Feco Hamburger showed a series of photographs in which the main theme was the “long time” of the stars, captured by means of long exposure shots. Another fundamental aspect of the photos exhibited – which both surprised and enchanted the artist – was the presence of a mysterious light in the pictures, even though they had all being taken at night. Here is Hamburger’s account of this experience:
“Instigated by the desire to register the orbit of the stars, I pointed the camera at the valley and waited with the camera open for 35 minutes. Upon developing the film, I was somewhat surprised: the sky was blue, the valley was green, and the spring flowers coloured the shot. The exposure time had not been long enough to capture the stars as I had hoped. But my attention was entirely turned to this apparent mystery: how could the dark of the night be transformed into such a photograph? (…) Long-exposure photography allows the build up of light which exists but is not visible to our eyes in one single photograph, imprinting the registration of time on the film. Unlike our eyes, which rather register instants. And the relationship between the light in darkness, motion and time became the focus of my approach…”
In those photos exhibited in 2004, it was obvious that the enchantment with this new discovery had yet to attain become the main guiding factor in the artist’s search, or in his encounters with his work. Here were pictures of valleys, airports, the curve of a highway, city landscape seen from a window… Evidently the celestial lights were there, just as all mysterious clarity in night photography (yes, this mystery which enchanted Hamburger is due to the photographic medium, not the subject). However, the pedestrian character, let us say, of most of the locations selected to serve as the setting of the photos, was combined with the gravity of the long time of the captured celestial bodies. A combination with highly stimulating aesthetic dividends.
Meanwhile, in the set of photographs that Hamburger now offers for public visitation at the Jewish Cultural Center, the circumstantial element of the chosen settings for the 2004 photos gives way to another situation. Instead of the view from an anonymous apartment window in the big city, or the reflections in the swimming pool of a house, the artist now presents images captured in the deserts of Israel and Jordan. However circumstantial a visit to these places may be, in themselves they possess nothing of the transitory. On the contrary.
The exorbitant dimension of a desert creates in the observer such an overwhelming and powerful sensation that, in the sphere of aesthetics, can only be translated by the concept of “sublime”. Beyond beautiful and far beyond picturesque, the search for the sublime in art has been attempted many times, but rarely attained. In painting, Turner is doubtless one outstanding example. Although I try, I am an unable to find a counterpart in the world of photography, despite several artists having tried both abroad (Edward Weston), and in Brazil (Marc Ferraz).
In some of these new Hamburger photographs, the artist connects the movement of a passing car headlight to the unchanging and timeless vastness of the desert. The “long time” of the desert (the desert is transformed, but in a practically unperceivable way to us) is juxtaposed against the brief time, the quick flux of a light which passes by from afar. However, this car light is only subject to emerging on the image due to the long exposure time of the camera.
Notice the poetic shuffling of Hamburger’s photos: in a place where time seems not to exist, he captures speed (in time and space) by means of a procedure that uses the extension of the ever-swift time of photography with the intention of constructing his visual proposal. In other words, the artist manipulates the medium to construct a fictional discourse on the transitory nature of the immutable or, ultimately, on man and the impossibility of his being eternalized just like the desert is (or seems to be) eternal. Here we have photography parting from the subject, but, by means of manipulation of the apparatus, going beyond to reach an allegorical dimension which is unsuspected at first glance.
In other photographs of the series, the artist juxtaposes the quick rhythm of the stars against the apparent stillness of the desert (photos which establish almost direct relationships to those shown in 2004). The strategy of manipulating the camera used here, transforming the split second of the shutter opening into an extended period of time, capable of capturing the path of the stars, is used to afford the composition rhythm (motion, time). This rhythm, this speed which is actually phoney (phoney because, without the assistance of the camera we would not be able to capture it), places the static nature of the desert of Israel or Jordan (and what matters least here is knowing the identity of the subject) against the fictitious (to our eyes) swiftness of the stars.
It is not common, especially in international contemporary photography, to use tricks as traditional as long exposure in order to produce pictures which are intended to be contemplated outside the voracity of vehicles of communication. Nowadays, in the circuits where photography is used as an art form there is the dominant use of the direct image, purposefully deprived of any “author” index, even though we all know how much the question of authorship still plays a fundamental role on the international art circuit.
Here in Brazil there are also very few artists who make use of long exposure. Still somewhat tied to the need for the photography not to escape the subject (the matter of “national reality” persists as an issue for many photographers), or else linked to experiments with digital media, the strategy adopted by Hamburger is also rarely seen in the work of his local peers.
This uniqueness of Feco Hamburger’s work, with his insistence on using a traditional strategy of camera manipulation during the process of shooting the images, does not remove him from the contemporary debate on photographic artwork. After all, much of the interest in “post-production” or digital photography is its capacity to bring to life the fictional character of the image, transforming it into text in which the subject – when it survives – becomes a mere shadow, or a pretext to the constitution of universes of images that tend to express concerns that transcend not only the limits of “direct” photography, but also the expressiveness of the “humanistic” current of 20th century photography. Hamburger’s photographs have come to prove that it is possible to maintain a contemporary attitude regarding the artistic debate without necessarily making use of the latest image production technologies. Which would be merely a matter of curiosity, if the artist had nothing to add to this debate. Which is not the case of Hamburger, whose photos have plenty to tell us about the possibility of transcendence in art today.
Tadeu Chiarelli, 2009 / On Permanence: Feco Hamburger, São Paulo, CCJ, 2009 – Exh Cat