Studies in blue

Two exhibitions held recently in India showcased some of the cyanotypes of the American photographer Robert A. Schaefer.

ROBERT A. SCHAEFER Jr is an American photographer of German descent. He first trained as an architect, and his pictures in the cyanotype process show that. Two of his shows one in Chandigarh, from November 11 to 17, and the other in Delhi, from November 17 to 24 have been sponsored by the Goethe-Institut, Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi. The cyanotypes on exhibition are largely to do with architectural forms and were shot in various places in Germany over 35 years and also in Chandigarh in 2009.

The cyanotype came up in the first half of the 19th century as an answer to the more expensive daguerreotype process. In the cyanotype process, the negative is brought into contact with a chemical-coated sheet of photographic paper pressed down by a sheet of glass and exposed to sunlight or black light. The image obtained in Prussian blue has an eerie, even ghostly, feel. Schaefer's images of the late 20th and early 21st century have a distinctly surreal quality.

Before embarking on his cyanotype project, Schaefer was also an accomplished practitioner of straightforward photography, that is, the yielding of an image going from white to a gamut of greys to black. He has, similarly, with aplomb rendered the world in naturalistic colours. Each of his two Indian exhibitions is a feather in his cap. The pictures in cyanotype have been created out of enlarged digital negatives as it has to be a contact print, meaning that both the positive and the negative image have to be of the same size.

Having spent the major part of his creative life thoroughly learning the most significant processes of conventional photography, he brought all his experience into play while working with the digital image. He is a photographer who has successfully straddled two clearly different worlds of image-making, analogue and digital, and has enriched the latter with his highly individual sensitivity to the play of light.

His catholic cultural upbringing in cosmopolitan (North) America gave him a wide exposure to the changing trends in Western painting, sculpture, graphics and cinema. Many of his cyanotypes have the feel of visuals from cinema's classic period, that is, from the silent era of the 1920s and a bit earlier to the beginning of the French New Wave in the late 1950s. There is a deceptive picture of a building in Chandigarh, which would have been ordinary in conventional black and white but gets an air of mystery because of the blue tint of the cyanotype. The stretch of water in the foreground, the severe architecture of Le Corbusier expressed in smooth cement, and a small van parked in the distance, on frame right, somehow create a sense of foreboding. It brings to mind the work of Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, two great French film-makers, and of poets such as Edgar Allen Poe, from his American inheritance, and, of course, Paul Valery, from his exposure to things French.

A cyanotype, like a conventional photograph, is the catching of a moment in time by the means of light. This freezing of time in the history of the world, its natural phenomenon, animals and humans is already an epiphany. It is, in the Proustian sense, a remembrance of things past. The blue in the cyanotype process is both its body and soul and opens the floodgates of memory. The evocation is, however, sad and nostalgic. This is true of Schaefer's top-angle view of a Chandigarh building with a dark artificial pond of water in lower frame right. The rigorous geometry of the buildings within the picture's rectangle cannot wipe out the sense of loss, of people with their personal histories of varying states of mind having occupied the now vacant space sometime earlier and who are no longer there.

Two depictions of aspects of Jantar Mantar, the unique 17th century meteorological observatory off what is now Connaught Place in New Delhi, show a quiet wit, enabling them to rise above mere documentation of a group of geometrical structures whose design served a scientific purpose with surprising accuracy in a more leisurely and poetic age. They give viewers a sense of time without their being aware of the actual functions of the structure in question. The quality of the afternoon light and the slight tint of blue combine to create an enduring visual experience.

Schaefer has swum against the current in 20th century American photography. He has eschewed the documentary photography tradition as pioneered by such diverse talents as Lewis W. Hine, Paul Strand, Walker Evans (seen most effectively in his two early books: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, done during the Great Depression probably with an 8 inch 10 inch view camera on a tripod, and then Many Are Called using a 35 mm Contax), Dorothea Lange, Ruth Orkin, Margaret Bourke-White, Roy DeCarava, Leonard McCombe, Lee Friedlander, Paul Fusco and Burk Uzzle. He has, instead, chosen to go the way most significantly trodden by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray and others. Schaefer explores dream worlds through the recognisable physical world. He, however, insists that his cityscapes have a science fiction quality, which would not be wrong because that literary genre does suggest dream worlds too.

Like Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy and Ed Emshwiller, Schaefer is deeply interested in the movies. A 1979 image he took of a train station in Hanover, Germany, has the same haunting quality as a frame from the great French documentarist Chris Marker's avant-garde Le Jette (The Jetty), which was made entirely with still photographs. Marker's was a sophisticated, truly experimental exploration of the science fiction genre in cinema on a half-a-shoestring budget. It is not unusual that Schaefer's pictures should recall frames from old movies in a general rather than a specific sense. Schaefer, like many other photographers of his time in the United States, was touched and spiritually informed by films. Cinema, like stills, deals with the passage of time and, hence, with memory. There is, to be sure, one difference: cinema deals with the passage of time, quite literally its movement, while still photography, at its best, helps one meditate on a moment frozen in time.

Schaefer has a kinship with that singular poet of American photography, Harry Callahan, despite the differences in their work. A streak of stubbornness, possibly cussedness, was an integral part of Callahan's personality, and it gave his photographs a lyrical intensity and, to use a dangerous word, integrity. Schaefer, too, has a streak of stubbornness in him that gives his work strength and integrity though all this is masked by his southern gentleman's politeness he is Alabama born. A 2009 visual of a child running away from the camera, taken at Fatehpur Sikri, near Agra, combines many genres of photography to create a deeply satisfying whole, much like Callahan's unique pictures. At first glance Schaefer's cyanotype of the running child at Fatehpur Sikri evokes the decisive moment attributed to Henri Cartier-Bresson, the great French master of candid photography. Schaefer's work carries within it reverberations of other major photographers from the past and yet retains a freshness of its own.

His training as an architect is apparent in the way he approaches a composition. In this exhibition of cyanotypes, every image is conceived in depth. He handles space as if he were building a house, with due consideration given to the direction of light and its role in accentuating or concealing the size and strength of a structure, and hence creates the desired stimulus in the viewer. Having achieved his objective, he can trigger certain responses that lead to the building up of a particular mood in a picture.

Almost from the beginning, superimpositions have been a part of the visual vocabulary of photographers. In the 20th century, the most poetic practitioner of superimpositions in American photography was Clarence John Laughlin, a southerner like Schaefer. Laughlin's pictures of the decaying South, particularly in the State of Louisiana, are indeed haunting, aided as they are by the subtle manipulation of tones in black and white. Schaefer, in his own way and in his chosen medium, continues the tradition of using superimpositions to make evocative visuals.

There is the front of an old Volkswagen, with its typically round headlight, reflected in a mirror with an ornate frame, with parts of old trees in the background: The mood is autumnal, and it looks as if it might begin to drizzle at any moment. This was taken in Munich in 1970. Also from Munich is a multiple-exposure of a shop window that has reflected in it paintings hung on two walls meeting at right angles; on the left, an old, presumably Greek, statue; old vases on the higher ground in the middle; below it, the back of an old car with a luggage carrier on the roof; and under it, what looks like upturned cane furniture. One becomes at once aware of the photographer's striking individuality as well as his being an integral part of a certain visual tradition in American photography.

Image-making has been a part of the human race for a mighty long time. Photography had its forerunner well before the invention of the camera. During the Italian Renaissance, in the 16th century, a Catholic priest showed a select audience upside down images in a darkened room by directing sunlight through a pinhole in the wall. He was burnt at the stake for conferring with the Devil.

Incidentally, the word camera comes from kamra, meaning a room in Arabic. When photography developed, quite rapidly in the 19th century, the medium was still limited to taking stationary objects such as landscapes, still lifes and posed portraits or group photos. Cameras were heavy, necessitating the use of a sturdy tripod, and only a single photograph could be taken at a time, after which the camera had to be loaded all over again. Shutter speeds and emulsions, too, were dreadfully slow. It was, therefore, inevitable that only a photographic still life was possible. The American Civil War in the 1860s threw up two masters: Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, who photographed the dead from both sides the North and the South and survivors who posed dutifully. This tradition, however, carried on into the 20th century, well after the advent of the 35 mm camera, fast lenses and shutter speeds, and really sensitive film emulsions.

The reason for this seeming anomaly was that there developed a school of photographers, in the U.S. and elsewhere, who unbeknownst to each other put into practice the Wordsworthian precept of emotion recollected in tranquillity. Ironically, there is nothing tranquil about the pictures of Clarence John Laughlin, Jerry Uelsmann or, for that matter, Schaefer.

This is the first exhibition of cyanotypes in a very long time in the capital, possibly in India. The Goethe-Institut, New Delhi, deserves to be thanked for bringing this show to India.