The photographer by Katerina Anghelaki Rooke (1994)

The butterfly goes toward the light, the photographer remains in the dark; the butterfly bends because on the finest fiber of her body she carries the weight of beauty. The photographer can endure blackness where is superbly organized and hopes: any moment now he’ll be able to imprint the difference between departure and death. Technically he is far from being perfect but he keeps earning the night and he is sure that this small difference, this idee fixe, this unimportant instance – a magician’s trick, that’s what it looks like – where abandonment is transformed into definitive death, will be captured.

Ah! How many membranes of immortality were necessary to envelope the event like a dead body and have both ideas, the one of the non-existent and the other of the perfectly finished, live harmoniously in the same corps! Obsessively, the photographer, amidst all the ideas of nature, chooses the body, among all the earthy things, the navel, among all the subjects in the sky, a falling star.

And he rubs, erases, dips in chemical liquids, the arm with the tiny scar, the slight bending of the back, the spot of the thigh that remains in the shadow.

“Like in a dream” he says, “like in a dream” years sit around his model’s head like a halo, but then again the photographer gets very angry and reveals his false teeth, when his projection is destroyed, in the most secret hour of the night, again, always at the same point: the eyes.

He’ll try again, another day, when he will have done all his exercises correctly – crying laughing and again – when he will have been careful with his diet – a bit of sorrow, sufficient distance, abundant survival – he’ll try again to impress the eyes as if they always existed – they will be coming from the picture endlessly – or as if they had never existed – their green shadow will look exactly like the opposite on them – he will ignore for a while the rest of the garden, even if it smells, God what fragrance life has when it is whole, before it gets fragmented – and he’ll pretend that his is thinking logically: since the eyes are the mirror of the soul and since the soul is eternal, they must be eternal too, they must be floating now, ascending, smiling to themselves, without their boss the body, and the lashes? Why not, them too, eyes without eyelashes don’t exist. And what about the eye-brows? But…And the forehead? The forehead, the beautiful haut-plateau where all the divine things seem to linger for a moment before they became inner things and it shone like a polished door of a rich house.

The photographer squeezed out the last little bit of chemical and in the little basin he trumped again the world’s most beautiful creature. He waited, looked out to the balcony (the balcony was very familiar with the model, with the morning dew and with…ah: the moon, of course) he knew that all the alterations were taking place: alterations of breath, of glance, of thought, now very soon the person dipped in the liquid of love was going to become posthumously untouched.

Think, think rationally, - the photographer was screaming in his head – if the eyes, then the face, the lips – that’s another story – the neck….A! It sounds like that French nursery rhyme song, cried the specialist of the negative when from the font of his art emerged the horrible stain of life, a monkey-faced death, a re-edition of the negative, a renewal of absence, of abandonment, of silence. That was perhaps the only positive thing. He had succeeded in imprinting silence. The only positive thing.

Aegina 4 July 1994

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The photographer by Katerina Anghelaki Rooke (1994)