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An Anthropology Of Quot Self Quot Pondering On The Use Of The Self-Portrait In Contemporary Photography.

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Todd Turner
Todd Turner

This document summarizes an art project by Leila Reinert titled "and if Duchamp knew of Clarice." The project involved using a pinhole camera to photograph nude bodies without technical apparatus or optical equipment. By eliminating the gaze and viewer, the photographs aimed to represent a world without "The Other." The light touches both the body and photosensitive paper directly, requiring stillness during exposure. The images reference Duchamp's nude female figure in "Étant donnés" but seek to eliminate desires and possible worlds by focusing only on the experience of seeing initiated by light between the photographed body and viewer.

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An Anthropology of “self”: Pondering on the use of the self-portrait in contemporary photography. “Suddenly, as if a healing fate had cured me of an old blindness with very fast and great results, I hold my head high, away from my anonymous life and towards the clear knowledge of my existence. And I see that everything that I have done, thought and been is some kind of mistake and madness. I wonder in what I have managed not to see. Strange what I was and what, in the end, I see I am not. I observe, like an extension of the sun bursting through the clouds, my past life; and I notice, in metaphysical awe, how all my most calculated gestures, my most clear ideas, and my most logical purposes, were in the end, nothing than innate drunkenness, natural madness, great ignorance. I did not even act. I was acted upon. I was not the actor, but their gestures. Everything I have done, thought, been is a sum of subordinations, either to a fake being I thought was me, since I acted from it to the outside, or of a weight of circumstances that I surmised to be the air I breathed. I am, in this moment of seeing, an instant loner, who recognizes herself an alien, where had always found herself a citizen. In the most intimate of what I though it was not me.” Livro do Desassossego – Fernando Pessoa Not by chance, the words of Fernando Pessoa, in the voice of Bernardo Soares, introduce the considered reflexion on the topic of the use of one's own body in contemporary photography. Who in modern times has known how to alter1 oneself so well? Knew how to not exist and to be unreal as the heteronymous that he invented2 ? On the other hand, what other art, apart from photography, propitiates such a contradictory relationship, constitutive, between the reality and the fiction of the existence. Much more that index of the real, or the record of a fact, a photography, in its necessary indiscretion, as Damisch3 affirms, multiplies the angles of vision and to always choose the most improbable points of view to allows to see the story, eventually our own story, to excite in us the restlessness and even the desire. But let’s slow down. It will be necessary to deacelarate the thought a bit in order to punctuate the questions that have been presented. maybe one could invert the discourse and “taken”4 Pessoa’s speech, as a photographical cliché, and by looking at it, we could see, even if just a small sliver, about a portrait of Self. The photograph imprints a presence – its condition of index, and expresses an absence – it is always what is no longer there. The photo-portrait, my photo, makes it clear that I exist, but as an advent of myself as another5 . Barthes speaks of a clever dissociation of the conscience from identity
that can only happen in photography – never in the mirror and less still on a painted, drawn or otherwise miniaturized portrait. (Right now it is not difficult to imagine Bernardo Soares speaking of himself facing his own portraits ) If the photography was, in its origin, defined as the automatic of truth, “the proof”, and at the same time it is the form of representation capable of dissociating the “I” from the “me”, of producing myself as another, would not the photo-portrait be the proof that I am not, nor ever was? Or as Pessoa would say: did not even act. The dissolution of the self as a stable identity is part of the photographic language, and propitiates experiences of depersonalization, that turns photography into a practice that allows many questions of the contemporary artistic production, that were already inserted by modern art in the 20th century, such as, for example, the search for an art that will manifest not in the subjective expression of the “self” anymore, or in the formal representation of an inside, but in the construction, or production, of ways of subjectifying the being, and/or of new existential territories. Therefore the presence of the body as a tool, support, or medium of the piece being so much in evidence from the 60s onwards. The body, as a historical object, is seen as multifaceted and the knowledge of its process, so much as the constitution of the social subject is a process, is so diversified as the cultural bases that constitute and transform it. If before the body was the border of the self, grounded on the enclosedness of the flesh in itself, today, captured6 , the body is the “apparent” manifestation of an state of being. The subjectivity was reduced to the body, its appearance, its image, its performance, its health, its longevity7 . That is, it is as if the body did not carry a psychic intimacy anymore, becoming pure exterior. From the post war period onwards, much was said of the body-object-merchandize, of the spectacle transformation of life, of the coming of the image of the “real” world, or of the huge changes derived from the proliferations of the “previously” called new information technologies, ideas that directly or indirectly slightly pass parallel by the identity constitution in actuality; and countless artists produced pieces pointing towards, questioning, making it clear or criticizing these conditions of existence in the most varied artistic practices. Francesca Woodman – Verticale, 1976/78 and Roma, 1977/78.
Cindy Sherman – Untitled Film Still #21, 1978 and Untitled #93, 1981. The body and the photography are present in many of these productions, not only the body in general, but the body of self (of the artist) and its challenges – the portrait, the self-portrait, or the fake(ct)-portrait. Why use the fake(ct)-portrait? Vladimir Safatle8 , points towards multiple regimes of depersonalization use in contemporary art, in which the dissolution of the Self, while expressive potency, means to reconstruct the possibility of something like a non-Narcissistic experience of object. In this moment, I introduce my work using as starting point a photographical essay I have called “and if Duchamp knew of Clarice.”9 The study about the essay is found in the text that I present in continuation. Leila Reinert – “and if Duchamp knew of Clarice”, 2001.
When photography is a meeting of skins “It is in the images that the principle of vision seems to reside, and without them no object can be known to us”. Lucrecius A light is something more important than a curious event. Experiment: 1. Materials: black box (pinhole), photosensitive paper, and a body. 2. agglutinate: light Question: To photograph while eliminating the maximum of technical apparatus and optical equipment. Photography that is produced by the touch of light. A light able to act directly upon organized matter to modify and adapt its structure. Life proceeds by insinuation. (Henri Bergson) And the smudge of pigment turns itself into an eye. The eye being affected by the light reacts actively to be able to see. Would the seeing be a mere whim of the light? Or are they Corpora – scintillating particles detached from the body's surface – entering through our pupils and imprinting our retinas, hurting our eyes and producing the phenomenon of vision? (Lucrecius) Always radiations of light that touch each other. And a black box (pinhole) makes itself into an eye. (Maybe, who knows, to compensate the blindness of my hurt eyes. To photograph is to exchange caresses through the medium of light. “... a kind of umbilical attachment links, to my sight, the body of the photographed thing: The light, although not palpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with him or her that was photographed.” (Roland Barthes) The light touches the body and the paper.
An intermediary body grading the luminosity. Some kind of drawing with the light. It requires 2, 3 or 5 minutes of stillness of the body, so that the little orifice, in the black paper box, will allow the right amount of light to seep in. To wake up the body so as to wake up the mind, said Bill Viola. A restful awakening, in the immobility (concentration) and never in the excitement of speed. There is no gaze cutting and/or composing the scene. There is not even a scene. There is only reverence. A ceremony. The concentration in the posturing of a Yogi. The works are called “ and if Duchamp knew of Clarice..” The nude body of a woman that Duchamp left us as legacy. Étant donnés... 1. The corporal dimension of the act of seeing that the light initiated. 2. The image of a body that happens in a world without The Other . “The Alter is a strange deviation, it lowers my desires about the objects, my loves about the worlds. The Altesr was this: A possible that is obstinate in passing itself as real. (Michel Tournier) ‘It is first on The Alter, by The Alter, that the difference between the sexes is founded, established.” (Deleuze) Considering the structure of The Alter as something that conditions the ensemble of the perceptive field (Deleuze), what can you give to be seen of a world without an alter? No gazing subject, no gazed upon object, but an eternal “now” where the conscience and its object make up for no more than one. The photograph, here, is not the recording of a fact. It is the bringing up to date of the light. A Phosphorescence. Light/skin shared between the eyes of the beholder and the photographed body. To photograph with a black box (pinhole) is, in the doing, the elimination of the Alter. There are no
desires, no other possible worlds but only abandonment and/or detachment. The possibility of being. A thought is constructed from the experience: not the manipulation of the image anymore, it is now necessary to manipulate the gaze itself. To beyond the image of a body, it is the body of the image that represents itself. The non-narcissistic experience of the object is here conceived starting from the experience of the world without The Alter. No gazing subject, no gazed upon object. The mechanical look of the black box (pinhole), in this case, is who chooses the image and produces a seeing without looking, a seeing that only happens in developing. So, one can speak of a fake(ct)-portrait because there is no “I” (self), there is no subject of an action, of the act of photographing, or even a look that focuses on the thing photographed. The revealed image offers us to see not the appearance of a body but the apparition of one; not the configuration of a self, but an autonomous image-being that exists in itself, and by itself, in the produced body image. An inhabiting the eternal present – of the photographical – where the conscience and its object make up for no more than one. One of Clarice Lispector's characters10 , Joana, takes upon herself to create a break between her and herself, that is, to establish some distance, in order to meet herself again later on. It is the break, in an very obvious affirmation, that allows this separation, it is the time – the photographical moment of these pictures last minutes. Between the preparation of the optical device and the propping of the body in the space, there is silence, and it awakens the body to the awakening of the mind. But the conquest of the knowing/being able to “other” yourself is not that simple. The tranquility of a stable “self”, recognizable, controllable, that coincides with the “myself” is very seductive. Or yet, the dressing up you of characters, acting out yourself in certain parts, presenting yourself as another, that is not to alter yourself. In my work, that has happened through the working with photographic exercises, without the conscience knowing exactly what the search was for. There was only a vague idea hovering over the elaboration process of the images, even though the body had always been in evidence in my work. When photography became part of my artistic practice, bodies, or better saying, metaphors or molds of pieces of bodies – in general - were articulated to the most varied materials. The photography made possible the recording of the articulations of the “real” body in more habitual gestures, as in the daily ritual of the bath. Partial views of the body were photographed by the blind eye of the camera. There was never an eye in the view finder, but there was already the wish to create new identities, or dissolve the old ones, and the photographic exercise was a good way to always discover a new body in “developing” (surprises on film). Difficult
not to surprise yourself when seeing in the image what one had yet not seen in the photographed gesture. The search was for an eluding embodiment, constructed and reconstructed in the relations, since the partial views of our body are what constitute our corporal identity, not the mirror. This production ended up by gaining many forms: big formats, books, notation books, and was linked to objects in exhibitions. Leila Reinert – 1996/98 The dissolving of identities is not here the annihilation, but the meeting, the affectability. It is necessary to invest vitality in the captured body, that can no longer support everything that coerces it, from within and without11 . It is to put the body in an embryo stage, to open space “to the beings yet to be born”, where the form is not yet achieved completely, an affirmation of Pelbart. To put the body in contact. Better saying, to pay attention to how the body affects and is affected. Meetings that happen in the surface of the image, in the produced body-image – a body that is nor a spectacle, nor an object, because where nothing else has any weight, where there is no gravity, and far away from its material self, the body lets go of its insistence in signifying12 . In the photographic exercise or “othering” yourself, the body is not even present, as in the series “The House is the Habitat of Habit” - pictures taken with long periods of exposure, where the diaphragm of the camera remains open, generally, for an hour. The home houses daily repetitions, ticks, and the body walks trough the familiar space. To photograph a house in the dark of night is a strategy to provoque ruptures of the daily routine, to escape it. In the bending of time, the house lights itself, reinventing the habitual space. The body sees and circulates differently in this other house that photography made appear.
Leila Reinert – “The House is the Habitat of Habit”, 2003/06 It is the photographic cutting of space and the “uncapture” of time, transforming the duration of the instant into an eternity. Fernando Pessoa, still using the voice of Bernardo Soares is going to say: “I saw truth for an instant. I was an instant, with conscience, what other men are with a lifetime. I remind them acts and words, and I do not know if they were winningly tempted by the Demon of Reality. To not know of oneself is to live. To not know enough of oneself is to think. To know of oneself suddenly, as in this “lustrous” moment is to suddenly have the notion of the intimate center, of the magical word of the soul. But this sudden light crests all, consumes all. Leaves us naked even from ourselves.” The lapse of the photographic instant, meager or distended, carries this moment of conscience, in which the conscience is conscious of everything it has conscience of13 . It is when the existence of a “Self” takes hold, without there being an “I” that embodies it. But this sudden light crests all, consumes all. And I am again the one I never was, and not even represented. Roland Barthes14 declares that in photography my body never encounters its grade zero, that only love, extreme love – his mother's love in this case – is capable of lifting the condemning weight of the image. It is evident that Barthes thought is connected to the acknowledgement of the “self” in the portrait, especially in the one, the other, the photographer, has taken from me. But here is something that the loving eye produces. If the structure of The Alter is something that conditions the set of the perceptive field, if it is on The Alter, by The Alter that the difference between the sexes is founded, what is the relation of possible love contained in the photographic image? Deleuze declares that we must therefore distinguish The-Alter-a-priori, that defines this structure, and this-The- Alter-here, that define the real terms realizing the structure in this or that field15 . The-Alter-a-priori, to Deleuze, is condition for possibility, and not necessarily the hangman of the “me-myself”, that has conditioned me as subject or object in the relation. This-The-Alter-here, that-The-Alter-there, as amplifiers of the worlds (possible), are able to receive me in the multiplicity of the “Self” - in the
pupating “my beings”, yet to be born. But what is the reason to invoque love in the fake(ct)-portrait, especially in a world in which the urgencies seem to be collective ones, globalized and/or techno-political? It seems démodé. However, if we speak of the affections of the body, immediately we speak of love, of feelings of pain and pleasure that sustain our existence. Susan Sontag16 declares that photography is a type of hyperbole, a heroic copulating with the material world, and its ethos is to train us towards an “intensive vision”. In the following presented works, the photographic love goes through the evocation of the tragic, since, as put by Jean-Luc Goddard, in the film The Detective, “Catastrophe is the first couplet of a love poem”. (Even if everything happens in a very banal way through the produced images). The bodies are almost absent, blending with their environment, and pictures of roses and a red room are articulated – themes that are even considered cliché in photography. This work was exhibited together with an experimental video – the resulting line of a profile of a kissing couple, is animated together with the soundtrack of someone reading an extract from the book “A Treaty in Courteous Love”, by André Capelão, written circa 1.180 A.D. The starting point for the animated image is a random picture taken of a random film from Television. Leila Reinert – “Fake(ct)-portrait”, 2003/06. Leila Reinert – “Love and Fake(ct)-portrait”, 2006. “Love and Fake(ct)-portrait” (details)
To conclude, again Pessoa can help us to think when telling us: “The poet is a faker. He fakes so completely, that he manages to pretend he is pain, a pain he really feels.” More than any other artistic practice, the photography incarnates this power of the fake, or, paradoxically, the winning temptation of the Demon of Reality. 1 The word ALTER [lat. Alteri.] have the meaning of somebobyelse, it is different than the meaning of the word other, but sometimes the other becomes alter. 2 PERRONE-MOISÉS, L. Fernando Pessoa – Aquém do eu, além do outro. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1982, p.12. 3 KRAUSS, R.. O Fotográfico. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2002, p.12. 4 The verb to take is used here in the sense of “taking away”, but also used in the Portuguese language as the verb for the act of taking a picture – To “take” the picture. 5 BARTHES, R. A Câmara Clara. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1984, p.25. 6 In his article “Vida nua, vida besta, uma vida”, Peter Pál Pelbart points out how “power has taken life by storm”. The body has been super invested by the present time and is captured by power, which today is not exerted from without, nor from above, but as it is from within, guiding our social vitality from beginning to end. Available at: < http://p.php.uol.com.br/tropici/html/ > and was last accessed 27.02.2007 7 Ibid. 8 SAFATLE, V. “O que vem após a imagem do si? ”. Available at: < http://p.php.uol.com.br/tropici/html/ > and was last accessed 01.08.2007 9 The references to the title of the essay are from Marcel Duchamp, particularly from “Etant Donnés”; and Clarice Lispector an important Brazilian modern fiction novelist. 10 LISPECTOR, C. Perto do coração selvagem. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, 1995. 11 PÁL PELBART, P. op. cit. 12 SENRA, S. “Corpos, cinema e vídeo”. In Políticas do Corpo. Edited by Denise Bernuzzi de Sant'Anna. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 1995. p.187. 13 “I have always suffered more with the consciousness of suffering than with the suffering that I was conscious of”. To Pessoa, to intellectualize the sensation is to abstract from it a profile, a line that allows us to link it to other psychic contents. Fernando Pessoa ou a metafísica das sensações. GIL, J. Lisboa: Relógio d'Água. 14 BARTHES, R. op. cit., p. 24. 15 TOURNIER, M. Sexta-feira ou Os Limbos do Pacífico. Postfácio, Gilles Deleuze. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand-Brasil, 2001. 16 SONTAG, S. Sobre Fotografia. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2004. p. 43.

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An Anthropology Of Quot Self Quot Pondering On The Use Of The Self-Portrait In Contemporary Photography.

  • 1. An Anthropology of “self”: Pondering on the use of the self-portrait in contemporary photography. “Suddenly, as if a healing fate had cured me of an old blindness with very fast and great results, I hold my head high, away from my anonymous life and towards the clear knowledge of my existence. And I see that everything that I have done, thought and been is some kind of mistake and madness. I wonder in what I have managed not to see. Strange what I was and what, in the end, I see I am not. I observe, like an extension of the sun bursting through the clouds, my past life; and I notice, in metaphysical awe, how all my most calculated gestures, my most clear ideas, and my most logical purposes, were in the end, nothing than innate drunkenness, natural madness, great ignorance. I did not even act. I was acted upon. I was not the actor, but their gestures. Everything I have done, thought, been is a sum of subordinations, either to a fake being I thought was me, since I acted from it to the outside, or of a weight of circumstances that I surmised to be the air I breathed. I am, in this moment of seeing, an instant loner, who recognizes herself an alien, where had always found herself a citizen. In the most intimate of what I though it was not me.” Livro do Desassossego – Fernando Pessoa Not by chance, the words of Fernando Pessoa, in the voice of Bernardo Soares, introduce the considered reflexion on the topic of the use of one's own body in contemporary photography. Who in modern times has known how to alter1 oneself so well? Knew how to not exist and to be unreal as the heteronymous that he invented2 ? On the other hand, what other art, apart from photography, propitiates such a contradictory relationship, constitutive, between the reality and the fiction of the existence. Much more that index of the real, or the record of a fact, a photography, in its necessary indiscretion, as Damisch3 affirms, multiplies the angles of vision and to always choose the most improbable points of view to allows to see the story, eventually our own story, to excite in us the restlessness and even the desire. But let’s slow down. It will be necessary to deacelarate the thought a bit in order to punctuate the questions that have been presented. maybe one could invert the discourse and “taken”4 Pessoa’s speech, as a photographical cliché, and by looking at it, we could see, even if just a small sliver, about a portrait of Self. The photograph imprints a presence – its condition of index, and expresses an absence – it is always what is no longer there. The photo-portrait, my photo, makes it clear that I exist, but as an advent of myself as another5 . Barthes speaks of a clever dissociation of the conscience from identity
  • 2. that can only happen in photography – never in the mirror and less still on a painted, drawn or otherwise miniaturized portrait. (Right now it is not difficult to imagine Bernardo Soares speaking of himself facing his own portraits ) If the photography was, in its origin, defined as the automatic of truth, “the proof”, and at the same time it is the form of representation capable of dissociating the “I” from the “me”, of producing myself as another, would not the photo-portrait be the proof that I am not, nor ever was? Or as Pessoa would say: did not even act. The dissolution of the self as a stable identity is part of the photographic language, and propitiates experiences of depersonalization, that turns photography into a practice that allows many questions of the contemporary artistic production, that were already inserted by modern art in the 20th century, such as, for example, the search for an art that will manifest not in the subjective expression of the “self” anymore, or in the formal representation of an inside, but in the construction, or production, of ways of subjectifying the being, and/or of new existential territories. Therefore the presence of the body as a tool, support, or medium of the piece being so much in evidence from the 60s onwards. The body, as a historical object, is seen as multifaceted and the knowledge of its process, so much as the constitution of the social subject is a process, is so diversified as the cultural bases that constitute and transform it. If before the body was the border of the self, grounded on the enclosedness of the flesh in itself, today, captured6 , the body is the “apparent” manifestation of an state of being. The subjectivity was reduced to the body, its appearance, its image, its performance, its health, its longevity7 . That is, it is as if the body did not carry a psychic intimacy anymore, becoming pure exterior. From the post war period onwards, much was said of the body-object-merchandize, of the spectacle transformation of life, of the coming of the image of the “real” world, or of the huge changes derived from the proliferations of the “previously” called new information technologies, ideas that directly or indirectly slightly pass parallel by the identity constitution in actuality; and countless artists produced pieces pointing towards, questioning, making it clear or criticizing these conditions of existence in the most varied artistic practices. Francesca Woodman – Verticale, 1976/78 and Roma, 1977/78.
  • 3. Cindy Sherman – Untitled Film Still #21, 1978 and Untitled #93, 1981. The body and the photography are present in many of these productions, not only the body in general, but the body of self (of the artist) and its challenges – the portrait, the self-portrait, or the fake(ct)-portrait. Why use the fake(ct)-portrait? Vladimir Safatle8 , points towards multiple regimes of depersonalization use in contemporary art, in which the dissolution of the Self, while expressive potency, means to reconstruct the possibility of something like a non-Narcissistic experience of object. In this moment, I introduce my work using as starting point a photographical essay I have called “and if Duchamp knew of Clarice.”9 The study about the essay is found in the text that I present in continuation. Leila Reinert – “and if Duchamp knew of Clarice”, 2001.
  • 4. When photography is a meeting of skins “It is in the images that the principle of vision seems to reside, and without them no object can be known to us”. Lucrecius A light is something more important than a curious event. Experiment: 1. Materials: black box (pinhole), photosensitive paper, and a body. 2. agglutinate: light Question: To photograph while eliminating the maximum of technical apparatus and optical equipment. Photography that is produced by the touch of light. A light able to act directly upon organized matter to modify and adapt its structure. Life proceeds by insinuation. (Henri Bergson) And the smudge of pigment turns itself into an eye. The eye being affected by the light reacts actively to be able to see. Would the seeing be a mere whim of the light? Or are they Corpora – scintillating particles detached from the body's surface – entering through our pupils and imprinting our retinas, hurting our eyes and producing the phenomenon of vision? (Lucrecius) Always radiations of light that touch each other. And a black box (pinhole) makes itself into an eye. (Maybe, who knows, to compensate the blindness of my hurt eyes. To photograph is to exchange caresses through the medium of light. “... a kind of umbilical attachment links, to my sight, the body of the photographed thing: The light, although not palpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with him or her that was photographed.” (Roland Barthes) The light touches the body and the paper.
  • 5. An intermediary body grading the luminosity. Some kind of drawing with the light. It requires 2, 3 or 5 minutes of stillness of the body, so that the little orifice, in the black paper box, will allow the right amount of light to seep in. To wake up the body so as to wake up the mind, said Bill Viola. A restful awakening, in the immobility (concentration) and never in the excitement of speed. There is no gaze cutting and/or composing the scene. There is not even a scene. There is only reverence. A ceremony. The concentration in the posturing of a Yogi. The works are called “ and if Duchamp knew of Clarice..” The nude body of a woman that Duchamp left us as legacy. Étant donnés... 1. The corporal dimension of the act of seeing that the light initiated. 2. The image of a body that happens in a world without The Other . “The Alter is a strange deviation, it lowers my desires about the objects, my loves about the worlds. The Altesr was this: A possible that is obstinate in passing itself as real. (Michel Tournier) ‘It is first on The Alter, by The Alter, that the difference between the sexes is founded, established.” (Deleuze) Considering the structure of The Alter as something that conditions the ensemble of the perceptive field (Deleuze), what can you give to be seen of a world without an alter? No gazing subject, no gazed upon object, but an eternal “now” where the conscience and its object make up for no more than one. The photograph, here, is not the recording of a fact. It is the bringing up to date of the light. A Phosphorescence. Light/skin shared between the eyes of the beholder and the photographed body. To photograph with a black box (pinhole) is, in the doing, the elimination of the Alter. There are no
  • 6. desires, no other possible worlds but only abandonment and/or detachment. The possibility of being. A thought is constructed from the experience: not the manipulation of the image anymore, it is now necessary to manipulate the gaze itself. To beyond the image of a body, it is the body of the image that represents itself. The non-narcissistic experience of the object is here conceived starting from the experience of the world without The Alter. No gazing subject, no gazed upon object. The mechanical look of the black box (pinhole), in this case, is who chooses the image and produces a seeing without looking, a seeing that only happens in developing. So, one can speak of a fake(ct)-portrait because there is no “I” (self), there is no subject of an action, of the act of photographing, or even a look that focuses on the thing photographed. The revealed image offers us to see not the appearance of a body but the apparition of one; not the configuration of a self, but an autonomous image-being that exists in itself, and by itself, in the produced body image. An inhabiting the eternal present – of the photographical – where the conscience and its object make up for no more than one. One of Clarice Lispector's characters10 , Joana, takes upon herself to create a break between her and herself, that is, to establish some distance, in order to meet herself again later on. It is the break, in an very obvious affirmation, that allows this separation, it is the time – the photographical moment of these pictures last minutes. Between the preparation of the optical device and the propping of the body in the space, there is silence, and it awakens the body to the awakening of the mind. But the conquest of the knowing/being able to “other” yourself is not that simple. The tranquility of a stable “self”, recognizable, controllable, that coincides with the “myself” is very seductive. Or yet, the dressing up you of characters, acting out yourself in certain parts, presenting yourself as another, that is not to alter yourself. In my work, that has happened through the working with photographic exercises, without the conscience knowing exactly what the search was for. There was only a vague idea hovering over the elaboration process of the images, even though the body had always been in evidence in my work. When photography became part of my artistic practice, bodies, or better saying, metaphors or molds of pieces of bodies – in general - were articulated to the most varied materials. The photography made possible the recording of the articulations of the “real” body in more habitual gestures, as in the daily ritual of the bath. Partial views of the body were photographed by the blind eye of the camera. There was never an eye in the view finder, but there was already the wish to create new identities, or dissolve the old ones, and the photographic exercise was a good way to always discover a new body in “developing” (surprises on film). Difficult
  • 7. not to surprise yourself when seeing in the image what one had yet not seen in the photographed gesture. The search was for an eluding embodiment, constructed and reconstructed in the relations, since the partial views of our body are what constitute our corporal identity, not the mirror. This production ended up by gaining many forms: big formats, books, notation books, and was linked to objects in exhibitions. Leila Reinert – 1996/98 The dissolving of identities is not here the annihilation, but the meeting, the affectability. It is necessary to invest vitality in the captured body, that can no longer support everything that coerces it, from within and without11 . It is to put the body in an embryo stage, to open space “to the beings yet to be born”, where the form is not yet achieved completely, an affirmation of Pelbart. To put the body in contact. Better saying, to pay attention to how the body affects and is affected. Meetings that happen in the surface of the image, in the produced body-image – a body that is nor a spectacle, nor an object, because where nothing else has any weight, where there is no gravity, and far away from its material self, the body lets go of its insistence in signifying12 . In the photographic exercise or “othering” yourself, the body is not even present, as in the series “The House is the Habitat of Habit” - pictures taken with long periods of exposure, where the diaphragm of the camera remains open, generally, for an hour. The home houses daily repetitions, ticks, and the body walks trough the familiar space. To photograph a house in the dark of night is a strategy to provoque ruptures of the daily routine, to escape it. In the bending of time, the house lights itself, reinventing the habitual space. The body sees and circulates differently in this other house that photography made appear.
  • 8. Leila Reinert – “The House is the Habitat of Habit”, 2003/06 It is the photographic cutting of space and the “uncapture” of time, transforming the duration of the instant into an eternity. Fernando Pessoa, still using the voice of Bernardo Soares is going to say: “I saw truth for an instant. I was an instant, with conscience, what other men are with a lifetime. I remind them acts and words, and I do not know if they were winningly tempted by the Demon of Reality. To not know of oneself is to live. To not know enough of oneself is to think. To know of oneself suddenly, as in this “lustrous” moment is to suddenly have the notion of the intimate center, of the magical word of the soul. But this sudden light crests all, consumes all. Leaves us naked even from ourselves.” The lapse of the photographic instant, meager or distended, carries this moment of conscience, in which the conscience is conscious of everything it has conscience of13 . It is when the existence of a “Self” takes hold, without there being an “I” that embodies it. But this sudden light crests all, consumes all. And I am again the one I never was, and not even represented. Roland Barthes14 declares that in photography my body never encounters its grade zero, that only love, extreme love – his mother's love in this case – is capable of lifting the condemning weight of the image. It is evident that Barthes thought is connected to the acknowledgement of the “self” in the portrait, especially in the one, the other, the photographer, has taken from me. But here is something that the loving eye produces. If the structure of The Alter is something that conditions the set of the perceptive field, if it is on The Alter, by The Alter that the difference between the sexes is founded, what is the relation of possible love contained in the photographic image? Deleuze declares that we must therefore distinguish The-Alter-a-priori, that defines this structure, and this-The- Alter-here, that define the real terms realizing the structure in this or that field15 . The-Alter-a-priori, to Deleuze, is condition for possibility, and not necessarily the hangman of the “me-myself”, that has conditioned me as subject or object in the relation. This-The-Alter-here, that-The-Alter-there, as amplifiers of the worlds (possible), are able to receive me in the multiplicity of the “Self” - in the
  • 9. pupating “my beings”, yet to be born. But what is the reason to invoque love in the fake(ct)-portrait, especially in a world in which the urgencies seem to be collective ones, globalized and/or techno-political? It seems démodé. However, if we speak of the affections of the body, immediately we speak of love, of feelings of pain and pleasure that sustain our existence. Susan Sontag16 declares that photography is a type of hyperbole, a heroic copulating with the material world, and its ethos is to train us towards an “intensive vision”. In the following presented works, the photographic love goes through the evocation of the tragic, since, as put by Jean-Luc Goddard, in the film The Detective, “Catastrophe is the first couplet of a love poem”. (Even if everything happens in a very banal way through the produced images). The bodies are almost absent, blending with their environment, and pictures of roses and a red room are articulated – themes that are even considered cliché in photography. This work was exhibited together with an experimental video – the resulting line of a profile of a kissing couple, is animated together with the soundtrack of someone reading an extract from the book “A Treaty in Courteous Love”, by André Capelão, written circa 1.180 A.D. The starting point for the animated image is a random picture taken of a random film from Television. Leila Reinert – “Fake(ct)-portrait”, 2003/06. Leila Reinert – “Love and Fake(ct)-portrait”, 2006. “Love and Fake(ct)-portrait” (details)
  • 10. To conclude, again Pessoa can help us to think when telling us: “The poet is a faker. He fakes so completely, that he manages to pretend he is pain, a pain he really feels.” More than any other artistic practice, the photography incarnates this power of the fake, or, paradoxically, the winning temptation of the Demon of Reality. 1 The word ALTER [lat. Alteri.] have the meaning of somebobyelse, it is different than the meaning of the word other, but sometimes the other becomes alter. 2 PERRONE-MOISÉS, L. Fernando Pessoa – Aquém do eu, além do outro. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1982, p.12. 3 KRAUSS, R.. O Fotográfico. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2002, p.12. 4 The verb to take is used here in the sense of “taking away”, but also used in the Portuguese language as the verb for the act of taking a picture – To “take” the picture. 5 BARTHES, R. A Câmara Clara. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1984, p.25. 6 In his article “Vida nua, vida besta, uma vida”, Peter Pál Pelbart points out how “power has taken life by storm”. The body has been super invested by the present time and is captured by power, which today is not exerted from without, nor from above, but as it is from within, guiding our social vitality from beginning to end. Available at: < http://p.php.uol.com.br/tropici/html/ > and was last accessed 27.02.2007 7 Ibid. 8 SAFATLE, V. “O que vem após a imagem do si? ”. Available at: < http://p.php.uol.com.br/tropici/html/ > and was last accessed 01.08.2007 9 The references to the title of the essay are from Marcel Duchamp, particularly from “Etant Donnés”; and Clarice Lispector an important Brazilian modern fiction novelist. 10 LISPECTOR, C. Perto do coração selvagem. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, 1995. 11 PÁL PELBART, P. op. cit. 12 SENRA, S. “Corpos, cinema e vídeo”. In Políticas do Corpo. Edited by Denise Bernuzzi de Sant'Anna. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 1995. p.187. 13 “I have always suffered more with the consciousness of suffering than with the suffering that I was conscious of”. To Pessoa, to intellectualize the sensation is to abstract from it a profile, a line that allows us to link it to other psychic contents. Fernando Pessoa ou a metafísica das sensações. GIL, J. Lisboa: Relógio d'Água. 14 BARTHES, R. op. cit., p. 24. 15 TOURNIER, M. Sexta-feira ou Os Limbos do Pacífico. Postfácio, Gilles Deleuze. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand-Brasil, 2001. 16 SONTAG, S. Sobre Fotografia. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2004. p. 43.