About Fortepan Masters
by Zoltán Dragon
So I turn the page
and the page turns
beyond the page.
It turns inside out,
beyond itself, beyond
the page that turns
inward.
Holding a huge bulk of carefully crafted and curated photographs in the strange format of a book whose pages defy the norms of flipping through and glancing at the images contained subverts expectations and sets new ones in the flick of a moment. The album, Fortepan Masters, celebrates photography by subverting its normal operation. It is a curated collection out of a vast database of photographs scanned and made available by the ongoing Fortepan project, an online archive of more than 100000 images found or donated to the database (fortepan.hu). The entire design is clearly a short-circuit in how photo albums operate. It also presents a short circuit in photography, of photography or through photography, on multiple levels. It is a collection of Masters (of whom? of what?) selected from a vast pool of anonymity recalling times when the only signature of the author was hidden in the texture of art. This invites us to pursue the pleasure of the text, as Roland Barthes would certainly agree, by doing away with authority, signatures to be respected, names to signify, uphold and direct our interpretation.
Masters without names - a subversion of authority and a game of haunting inasmuch as the photographers’ names should bear significance for the beholder to initiate the chain of signification, the play of noticing and enticing elements of a composition now decomposed, frames of deframed information. The images collected here are devoid of the classics, of the canonized, of the well-known Masters, hence the studium is somewhat lacking. As Roland Barthes says, the studium of the photograph is “the order of liking” (Barthes 2020, 33), the level of information and cultural codification, of general interest, of studying the image, the “good eye” (Rogoff 2002, 28) of perception.
Masters in or of the vernacular? Is it not an uncanny oxymoron to have a Master in vernacularity? But it is through the vernacular that the Master is born: the Latin root of the word, verna, originally meant “home-born slave” - and is it not the slave that makes the Master in Hegelian dialectics? “Masters of the vernacular,” however, coincides with the promotional statements on the website of the book, Fortepan Masters is a particular collection of photographs from the Hungarian archive that are “the most remarkable,” “the best and most exciting” and the ones that have poetry, “artistic value” and “fine art” in them. Hence, the Masters are out of the vernacular, of the everyday, of the ordinary. Curiously, the oxymoronic nature of the credo and the mission through the naming of the collection is reinforced by the design, the extraordinary, the unexpected, the artistic, the curated. Masters are, indeed, the extra in the ordinary.
But it is not only the Masters who retain their anonymity: the subjects of the photographs also interpellate us without names. No introduction needed, their eyes lock with ours, construing a space through the compositional frame. They invite us to flip in - we turn the page and instead of leaving them we find ourselves more inside that topology than before. The intricately woven temporality of photography (in general) gives way to the uncanny and haunting emplacement within the space of the photograph (in particular) through the folds. The dynamism of openings and closings entangles us into the warps of spaces. Touch the photograph and you can smell and hear it, see the image and you can enter its space, transforming it into a special phenomenological place. Through photography, time takes place.
The Fortepan Masters, therefore, is the punctum in itself: the bulky and heavy photographic object that peaks curiosity by itself, pushing one beyond the “average affect” (Barthes 31), the studied, orderly, acquired appreciation of any photographic album, bringing one through “a cast of the dice” (33), through the accidentality of the flipping and folding of the pages to open up for surprise, for the “sting, speck, cut” (ibid.) of engaging with the weight of the collection.
The design and the binding and folding structure of the book, therefore, constitute a punctum before the studium is allowed to arrive. It darts into the topology of the visible before one flattens out the entire composition of particular scenarios - perception unfolds, literally. It reverses or flips our horizon of expectations, upside down, inside out. How can photography of this kind be not topological and spatial from the start? Indeed, the paratext becomes a salient element of the endeavor to just see the photos collected, creating an uncanny and immensely palpable, tactile and ultimately haptic experience. Shaken out of control, the eye of the beholder is reminded of the scopic field having been lent to them, rather than positing them as the imaginary origo of visual mastery. The gaze obviously precedes the look, the photographic images are anamorphic by design, destabilizing conventional interpretations and inviting to indulge.
Writing for a journal called eidolon is perhaps unconsciously deliberate, as the Fortepan book invites the haunting feeling that photography is able to see the unseen, revive the dead and allow us to visit the space beyond the flat surface of the image. It is as if the multiple layering of specific photographs, the turning of the pages that act as cropping out, zooming in, decomposing and then back, interrogates the superficial flatness of the pictures, of photography itself.
Through the haptic experience, by being present in opening up the images of the album, one revives the ontological aspect of the photographs beyond the temporal axis, being emplaced into the very situation, into the space of the frame. As Jacques Derrida explains, ontopology is an “axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present being [on] to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general” (Derrida 1994, 82). I think there is a double ontopology at work in diving into the flipping waves of visual information unfolding on these pages. The ontopology of the then-and-there, its medial and technological intervention is reflected upon the haptic dive of the spectator of the here-and-now. We are the ones to compose the photograph beyond the Masters. We partake in the very framing of the image. It is us directly who enter the topological structure in which the world opens itself to be framed for posterity. Temporality does not make any sense in this experience: we flip through layers of topological configurations. Time is lost, we are lost in time, while the single space we inhabit becomes the places the photographs open for us: just as the world had opened itself for the photographers. When time is out of joint, space snaps into place: this is the emplacement of the beholder through the folds of the page.
It is precisely here that the motto of Ildikó Enyedi’s contribution - like Barthes, she circles around photographs without showing them, and like Barthes, she writes an ode to the power of photography, of personal imaging -, taken from Merleau-Ponty makes sense in the form of the topological figure of the chiasm: “the world is at the heart of our flesh … once a body-world relationship is recognized, there is a ramification of my body and a ramification of the world and a correspondence between its inside and my outside and my inside and its outside (Merleau-Ponty 1968 [1964], 136). The utterly different quality of the paper on which Enyedi’s words flow contrasts that of the smoothness of the pages of the photographic images, as if the sentences construed a geographical topography of the landscape of the thoughts encrypted in the text. The textual fabric adds to the very materiality of the folds, embraces the reader and invites them to wrap themselves in the imagery. The translucent page gives way to the transgressive in that leads through materials to find its place in the overflow of the next photograph, one of the three hundred and thirty, less than one for a day in the year and yet more, as a photograph is never one. Here again, by this gesture, the album defies time and creates a multidimensional experience of spatiality.
List of References:
Barthes, Roland. (2020). Camera Lucida. (trans. Richard Howard) Vintage: London.
Derrida, Jacques. (1994). Specters of Marx. (trans. Peggy Kamuf) Routledge: New York.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968 [1964]). The Visible and the Invisible. (trans. A. Lingis) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Rogoff, Irit. (2002) “Studying Visual Culture”, in Nicholas Mirzoeff (2002) The Visual Culture Reader. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 24-36.
Photographs of the book by Csaba Villányi and Zalán Péter Salát
Fortepan Masters is a 690-page vernacular photographic album
The book was on the shortlist of the Les Rencontres de la Photographie’s 2022 Book Awards in the historical book category, won the Hungarian Design Award in 2022, and received a Special mention at the German Design Award 2023.
Order the book here!
