ROAD AS ABODE

Poetry as Means of Generating Life and Photographic Value

June 25, 2018

Je suis l'espace où je suis. - Noël Arnaud

I am the space where I am.

 Just as we see little spiders or certain insect larvae hidden like precious stones in their cotton and stain pouches. In the same way, I was shown an entire nestful of still embarrassed suns in the cold folds of the nebula.

-        Paul Claudel, Cinq Grandes Odes

If a poet looks through a microscope or a telescope, he always sees the same thing.

-        Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

The Paleolithic Lascaux cave paintings in southwest France offer some of the most stirring evidence of a millennia old instinct to capture and recast that which exists outside the individual mind. The sophistication and expressive depth of these ancient paintings, primarily portraying large animals, conveys the urge to reconcile our inner reasoning voice, as it makes sense of the greater cosmos through representative storytelling. The creation of art, or any representational narrative, has always been a declarative act. It brashly unifies self and nature, giving voice to the sensitives of man against the backdrop of an indifferent cosmos. Each modality brings a specific coloring to the delivery of truth. Yet be it painting, poetry, sculpture, literary fiction, music, cinema, photography, every form of representational storytelling shares a common potential: voicing the collision of man and nature.

In Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, the French physicist turned philosopher of poetry explores the specific potential of written poetry in giving voice to this collision of man and nature. In asking how written poetry moves the hearts and minds of non-poets, Bachelard underlines the universal instinct that exploded onto the walls of Lascaux, onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and onto Instagram feeds ad infinitum. Bachelard lays out a methodology that aims to understand the onset of written poetic images in the mind, and their role in reconciling self and cosmos through dreaming, imagination, and the intimate and ubiquitous contextualization of physical space.

As a recovering scientist, Bachelard eschews a reductionist, ‘objective’ view of nature in favor of a methodology that prioritizes the individual, subjective instance of a poetic image. His exploration of space, how it is grasped by the human mind, and how the mind generates value based on that grasping, implores the reader of poems to consider an image “not as an object, and even less as the substitute for an object, but to seize its specific reality” (Bachelard, xv). This, Bachelard argues, is the only means by which we might understand the forces that are manifested in poems, as poems “do not pass through the circuits of knowledge. The dialectics of inspiration…become clear if we consider their two poles: the soul and the mind” (xvii). In elevating the soul and mind of human beings as the primary means to understand poetic value, Bachelard centralizes the reading of written poetic images around the original state of reverie induced by an image on the individual consciousness.

The well-attuned, written poetic image derives its dynamic power from a simplicity of expression. This simplicity penetrates the mind as it quietly and succinctly lays bare the image of contemplation. The photographic poetic image generates a similar sort of dynamism, as it quite literally presents the image of contemplation. As the specific reality presented consumes the mind, the image coalesces the soul and mind around a singular poetic reverie. While written poetry relies on a secondary linguistic mechanism, photography makes use of an instinctive language grounded in the literal forms of nature, giving vocabulary to a primitive voice that supersedes poetic logos.

Alfred Eisenstaedt’s V-J Day in Times Square at once conveys an instinctive understanding of the exuberance of passion, longing eclipsed by presence, spontaneity triumphing over fear, all against the loaded connotative history of WWII and of Times Square. As Bachelard asserts, we do not experience these elements, and countless others, as representations. Instead we seize upon them, make them our own, understand them so primitively as if we had always known them, each element uniting toward a climax of poetic revery. The photographic poetic image lays bare for the mind the image itself, and thus its qualitative phenomena in one sweeping instantaneity. In broad terms, it is this synergism of photography, the bridging of physical and qualitative elements in such a way that uniquely reveals the human psyche, that I will explore in this paper.                                       

I will first outline Bachelard’s concept of the poetic image, and the associated function of the poetic imagination. I will then stimulate Bachelard’s terminology with the distinct potential of street photography in generating poetic revery.  I will then turn toward a more extensive definition of street photography, coupled with a reflection on travel, which will draw heavily on the dialectic of the house, which Bachelard probes in chapters one and two of his Poetics of Space. I will argue that physical space and mind intersect in a way that grounds the poetic imagination, allowing it to dream fully in all inhabited space. I will then explore how the unification of space and mind allows the street photographer to integrate ‘road as abode,’ and exist in a state of continuous poetic revery. After a general understanding of poetic revery is outlined in terms of the ‘road as abode’ methodology, I will explore how poetic revery bridges inner (self) and exterior (cosmos) immensity. This exploration will be grounded in the photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue’s anthology, Life in Color.

Photography gives but one voice to the poetic revery that stirs within us all. It appeals to our instinct to freeze and internalize nature as it whirls past in a frenzy of color, value, and form. The photographic poetic image benefits from the anarchism of nature, and a climatic potential that outpaces other means of artistic expression in giving voice to the collision of nature and man. The final poetic image however is but one piece to a larger methodology of expression and truth discovery. The act of seeing and composing poetic images in the chaos and apathy of nature, and the act of self-discovery that accompanies this creation, all work toward manifesting a presence of mind and stillness of spirit synonymous with continuous poetic revery. It is this methodology of living through creation that I hope to articulate in the following pages.

i.        Bachelard’s ‘Poetic Image’ and the Role of the Poetic Imagination

Gaston Bachelard was known for his affection toward the things of the earth; be it the physical contours of his birthplace in Bar-sur-Aube France, the twinkling heavens, or a fine cut of meat at the local butcher, Bachelard recognized the power of objects on the human psyche. For most of his early career, he focused on the philosophy of science and the capacity of scientific knowledge as an instrument to “achieve an always closer approach to concrete reality” (Bachelard, viii). Science provided him a polished and systematic methodology to explore the essence of the objects of his concrete reality, the objects to which he was so instinctively drawn. With the publishing of The Psychoanalysis of Fire in 1938, Bachelard would boldly depart from reason and science in favor of poetry and imagination as the primary means by which he made sense of his ‘concrete’ reality.

This departure resonates with a larger conflict in the history of philosophy, that of the role of science in determining reality, truth, and value. As the predominant truth-seeking means for humanity for the better part of three centuries, scientific inquiry and progress has become synonymous with human inquiry and progress. With the technological, biomedical, and engineering advances it has brought, it is not difficult to see why we have had, and will continue to have, such a pervasive love affair with science. And yet once we contextualize scientific methodology with past knowledge frameworks, we might see science as simply the latest and greatest ‘technology’ created to understand our place in the cosmos. Science has yielded tremendous fruit to this end, but in its descriptive methodology, it rushes past the surface of things and misses something essential.

A mark of good science is reproducibility, that the same results can be achieved regardless of location, observer, bias, experience, or time. This tendency of removing human bias is crucial if you hope to produce a vaccine that will be effective regardless of location, observer, bias, experience, or time. But what if your goal is rather to order the lives of human beings? To justify purpose and existence? To justify the ends of science itself? Science succeeds in description, but fails in determining the tonality of things, for it removes tonality as a principal virtue. I will not try to convince you that the question ‘what constitutes concrete reality’ is of no value, but rather that the question ‘what constitutes my individual, concrete reality’ is a necessary follow up if we are to justify human existence in the utopia science will supposedly build. For human existence fortifies itself with tonality and bias through the act of poetry. It is the human, all too human, process of the individual imagination asserting itself in attempt to justify, and make beautiful, its own existence. For if we cannot understand and elucidate that process, what is the point of living in a well-catered science metropolis anyway?   

Bachelard sees the imagination as a primitive cosmic force, as much as a psychological faculty. He understands the imagination as a force of the mind that precedes thought or reason, one that perceives as much as it manifests. Bachelard argues that the imagination speaks to, and through us in the language of images. When we read a poem for example, the words on the page conjure a series of images to appear in our head seemingly without effort or control. It is these images, and all their deeply interwoven values, emotional content, and symbolism that constitutes the poetic imagination. The poetic imagination is not limited to the reading of poetry; it can be triggered by gazing upon a particularly stirring mountain range, by viewing a piece of contemporary art, by a lively conversation with friends, or by the penetrating aroma of freshly ground coffee. Your poetic imagination is hopefully being triggered right now as your read this text. The poetic imagination, and its corresponding poetic images, constitutes “a direct product of the heart, soul, and being of man, apprehended in his actuality” (xiv). That is to say, the poetic imagination undergoes constant change, synergizing values, aesthetic preferences, language, experience, tastes, memories, and physical reality. But in the exact moment a poetic image appears in the mind, it is a crystallization of the present state of the individual. It is a manifestation of everything that proceeded it, an anticipation of everything to come, coalesced into a moment of pure presence. In that moment of pure creation of the mind, the emergent image serves as the most authentic and comprehensive object of study in understanding the corresponding individual psyche.

Bachelard writes, “only phenomenology – that is to say, consideration of the onset of the image in an individual conciseness – can help us to restore the subjectivity of images and to measure their fullness, their strength and their transsubjectivity. These subjectivities and transsubjectivities cannot be determined once and for all, for the poetic image is variational, and not, as in the case of the concept, constitutive” (xv). For Bachelard, the potency or value of an image is measured in terms of its subjective nature, e.g. what is the individual cognitive/subconscious impact of such an image. The images generated by different individuals from a common stimulus can be compared to grasp a superseding, essential quality of the stimulus. Comparison can even reveal something universal about the human psyche. But as the images are as inherently variational as the individuals that produced them, the purest suggestive value of an image is found within its singularity as a direct phenomenon of the individual soul.

Not only is the poetic image a phenomenon of the individual soul, it stimulates further poetic imagination, and in some cases, direct physical action. Like Nietzsche’s Will to Power, the poetic imagination retains a dynamic, cosmic potential in its ability to move the hearts, minds, and bodies of human beings. And yet it goes beyond a motivational potential. Pierre Jean Jouve, the French poet and novelist suggestively writes, “poetry is a soul inaugurating a form.” Jouve is highlighting an essential task that all human children undergo: the ‘ground up’ process of giving meaning to the physical world. Let us consider a simple example.

A young child sees a circle on the wall with strange markings. Over time, the child continues to notice that her parents refer to the circle before setting her down in the crib, saying things like “it’s past eight, it’s time for you to be in bed!” The child learns to count, and eventually realizes that the strange marking on the circle are numbers, and that those numbers reference some thing called ‘time.’ She realizes that the circle tracks it, consequently restricting her freedom to stay awake. The young child brings new associations, new qualities, reactions, feelings, as the poetic imagination ‘inaugurates’ the form beyond its physical reality. As the child grows, she learns expressions like “the cyclical nature of time” or “history repeats itself.” She re-inaugurates the form of the clock; she brings new appreciation to its circular shape, which reshapes her values of the concept of time, her associated freedoms, fears, hopes, and desires. This perpetually unfinished process is the poetic imagination inaugurating the forms of the world, and in a sense, inaugurating the soul itself. This process of the poetic imagination gathers momentum throughout life, one that grows deeper, more intimate and complex as the soul and mind grow deeper, more intimate and complex. Bachelard writes,

“The soul inaugurates, here it is the supreme power. It is human dignity. Even if the “form” was already well-known, previously discovered, carved from “commonplaces,” before the interior poetic light was turned upon it, it was a mere object for the mind. But the soul comes and inaugurates the form, dwells in it, takes pleasure in it.” (Bachelard, xviii)

The poetic imagination is then the active process that makes us individual, that which ennobles us to pursue ourselves and rejoice in the process, that which makes us human.

Whether in our head, on a gallery wall, or the physical world itself, images that move us come alive and fill us with life. Bachelard makes use of a particularly resonant metaphor to consider the poetic imagination, and how it reverberates through the mind and soul: “It is as though a well-spring existed in a sealed vase and its waves, repeatedly echoing against the side of this vase, filling it with their sonority” (xiii). The reverberations created by an image resonate off the many contours of the soul, and impart to it a dynamic, physical potential. “The exuberance and depth of a poem are always phenomena of the resonance-reverberation doublet. It is as though the poem through its exuberance, awakened new depths in us” (xix). Bachelard argues that a resonant image reverberating through the soul is a physical, state-altering procedure, like that of light stripping electrons from atoms in a photovoltaic cell. And like the light hitting a photovoltaic cell, setting the flow of electrons in motion to generate a current, “a poetic image sets in motion the entire linguistic mechanism.” He continues:

After the original reverberation, we are able to experience resonances, sentimental repercussions, reminders of our past. But the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface. It takes root in us. It has been given us by another, but we being to have the impression that we could have created it, that we should have created it. (Bachelard, xix)

Images stir the poetic imagination, memories, visions of the future, and the soul in complex, intertwined ways. And yet the result is always the same: the image deeply supplants itself, consuming the mind so wholly that the individual is able to seize the image’s concrete reality, and incorporate it with their own. When we contemplate a sunset, when we allow the vista to be the singular occupant of our mind, we achieve an elevated state of revery. Once the mind’s internal ramblings are quieted, the image of contemplation, a sunset in this case, consumes the mind in a moment of pure presence. “The mind is able to relax, but in poetic reverie the soul keeps watch, with no tension, calmed and active…for a simple poetic image, there is no project; a flicker of the soul is all that is needed” (xviii). Much like the mental quiet achieved through meditation, once an image has fully taken root, the mind is free to wholly accept the reality presented as it “liquidates the past and confronts what is new” (xxviii). This process unfetters the consciousness as it collapses the self, ego, and time into a moment of pure spatial appreciation.

Once the psychoanalyst within us however begins to intellectualize the image, the attempts to understand the image, the attempts to “untangle the skein of his interpretations” (xx), mute the reverberations and dull the overall revery. For Bachelard, understanding the way an image reverberates through the soul requires “an equal capacity to forget knowing” (xxviii). He continues, “In poetry, non-knowing is a primal condition; if there exists a skill in the writing of poetry, it is in the minor task of associating images. But the entire life of the image is in its dazzling splendor in the fact that an image is a transcending of all the premises of sensibility” (xxviii). This primal condition of non-knowing is the essential quality of the selfless, meditative appreciation achieved in poetic revery. Non-knowing is equal to the evaporation of self, in order to achieve singular presence in the concrete reality of the image. Through this initial moment of unified presence, as the image plunges the depths of the soul, the divisions between nature and man are erased as the cosmos comes to live in the mind. The individual then integrates the image as it reverberates through mind and memory, internalizing itself within the poetic imagination. The sensational newness achieved through the sublimation of self catalyzes a pure beginning for the individual. While some beginnings are more transformative and momentous than others, each present fresh opportunity for the poetic imagination, and thus the physical capacity of the individual. The transcendence of knowledge in favor of reflective stillness renews the individual. Each image presents an opportunity of pure beginning for the soul, and consequently for the physical body. As such, the integrative process of the poetic imagination is the supreme act of creation, an uncompromising exercise in freedom.

Street photography uniquely harnesses the potency of the pure beginning, presenting a powerful methodology for synthesizing the poetic potential of the physical world with its transformative impact on the human psyche. Bachelard hints at this potential when he writes, “Lapicque demands of the creative act that it should offer him as much surprise as life itself” (xxix). From a purely methodological standpoint, street photography derives its narrative potential from physically synonymizing the surprise of creation with the surprise of life. Unlike other sedentary processes of creation, wandering block to block readies the mind for evaporation in the face of newness. By continually situating himself at the precipice of non-knowing, the street photographer continually quiets and liberates the poetic imagination in the valleys and peaks of poetic vivacity that the city offers. The photographer’s mind intimately tunes itself to the city’s multiplicity of poetic images, each presenting a fresh opportunity for pure beginning. Clive Scott in his Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson beautifully and succinctly captures this quality of street photography:

The generator of interior monologue, as of street photography, is the act of walking, wandering without particular objective, so that mechanisms of reception, and the mind’s readiness to associate, are at a maximum. Walking the streets releases the walker from the obligations of narrative, the need to get from here to there. Words and images are free to inhabit the mind, the eye, without their being appropriated to serve an ulterior purpose. The observations of the interior monologist, like the images of the street photographer, have no debts to finality, can be made of pure contingency, are the point of intersection of the street’s temporalities and the inner time of the monologist/photographer. (Scott, 41)

By placing the poetic imagination in perpetual motion, the street photographer seeks the fresh instantaneity of the world to generate a cycle of quiet, sudden liberation through pure beginning, and the ultimate resurgence of self. The repetitious act of composing photographs becomes a springboard for the poetic imagination, generating a perpetual mechanism of creation as the world facilitates endless beginnings. In this way, the street photographer “does not create the way he lives, he lives the way he creates” (xxix).   

ii.          Road As Abode: Street Photography As a Means Toward Perpetual Poetic Revery

I dream in a room that grew buoyant and, little by little, expanded into the vast stretches of travel.

-        Jean Laroche

Developing compositional and narrative techniques in tandem with the Impressionist painters of late 19th century France, ‘Street Photography’ retains a unique potential for generating poetic value. The art critic Gilles Mora designates the street photographer, in his eyes subordinate to the documentary photographer, as “both badaud (the ‘gawper’ who happens to be in the right place at the right time, without premeditation or motive) and flâneur (the serious amateur of other people’s lives, in pursuit of quarry without quite knowing what it might be)” (Scott 5-6). Yet this understanding of street photography presupposes a methodology satisfied with passive reportage, rather than active creation. Whereas documentary photography works to create an indexical object that confines its subject to a final reality, street photography animates poetic value through the “promise of multiformity, of wonderfully random and changing lives, capable of flying off, anarchically, in all directions” (Scott 4).

In capturing the breathing city, the street photographer elevates the pure beginning of all moments, each serving as a declaration of the unfixed nature of individual human beings. Where documentary photography derives its dramatic effectiveness by a need to “imply that social predicaments are permanent,…street photography depicts predicaments as temporary, a glitch in a colorful and varied existence” (Scott 7). Scott highlights street photography’s pursuit of beginnings with a pointed example: “while both the documentary photograph and the street photograph can concern themselves with, say, tramps, the documentary is more likely to find the down-and-out, while the street photograph will give us the clochard, down on his luck, but weathering the storm” (7). While the documentary photograph dictates and finalizes, the street photograph, in the spirit of the poetic imagination, presents the culmination and climax of history through an assertion of the individual freedom that accompanies pure beginning.

This contrast between documentary and street photography can be seen in comparing Margret Bourke-White’s World’s Highest Standard of Living (1937) with Dorthea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936). Bourke-White, as an example of documentary photography, synonymizes individual and plight, rendering her subjects defenseless from the gaze of the camera, and of history. In an effort to produce pity, Bourke-White manipulates her subjects, injects a curated reality, in order to fit her pre-conceived narrative. Lange however, in the spirit of street photography, honestly captures her subjects on their terms, accentuating their dignity and tenacity in the face of adversity. Lange sublimely elicits the pure beginning of her subject facing the future, weathered and exhausted, but determined to overcome circumstance.

Street photography, in its elucidation of the perpetual beginning of humankind, is uniquely positioned to generate poetic value as it makes use of the same methodology that activates and orders the poetic imagination: dreaming. The act of dreaming, much like the street photograph, coalesces the history of the individual toward the vast and fantastic possibilities of the future. While street photography generates poetic images capable dreaming, and thus inducing a dreamlike state in the viewer, the process alone of pursuing and capturing moments (with or without a camera) activates the poetic imagination through dreams. Daydreaming, a sort of waking poetic revery, is the poetic imagination projecting itself back onto the world, in real and/or fantastical ways. When we see a particularly alluring house for example, on a walk through the neighborhood, we dream of what it would be like to call such intimacy our own. Bachelard writes that “the great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dream” (Bachelard, 15), implying that poetry voices the poetic imagination by means of dreaming.

Comprehensive dreaming can only occur when the mind is sufficiently relaxed, sufficiently protected (usually when the body is asleep), in its most vulnerable and intimate state. In chapters one and two of the Poetics of Space, Bachelard meticulously illustrates the sheltering capacity of the house in facilitating dreams. Bachelard writes, “…my aim is clear: I must show that the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories, and dreams of mankind. The binding principle in this integration is the daydream.” (6). In outlining the impact of the house in shaping and enabling the poetic imagination, Bachelard presents the reader with a specific poetic object that points to a non-dualism, a oneness of mind and inhabited space. This unification of mind and physical space through ‘at homedness’ will prove to be the cornerstone of a street photography methodology known as Road as Abode.

Bachelard outlines the home as an essential element to dreaming, as “the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, allows one to dream in peace (6).” In directly enabling the act of dreaming, the house concentrates the concrete, intimate essence of how we inhabit our vital space, “how we take root, day after day, in a corner of the world” (4). The house of our birth achieves an elevated role in developing the poetic imagination as “the house we are born in is more than the embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dream” (15). This conception of the first home resonates with the capacity of dream to facilitate pure beginnings, as the first home is quite literally our pure beginning: “The soil in which chance had sown the human plant was of no importance. And against this background of nothingness human values grow” (58). Our first house, and consequently all houses that follow, conveys to us the dynamic power and intimacy of dreaming, anchoring the memory in the familiar intimacy of rooted space: “Was the room a large one? Was the garret cluttered up? Was the nook warm? How was it lighted? How, too, in these fragments of space, did the human being achieve silence? How did he relishes the very special silence of the various retreats of solitary daydreaming?” (9).  This view indicates that the act of dreaming is indeed cumulative, invigorated by the concrete, intimate essences that are collected from inhabiting a multitude of physical spaces:  

After we are in the new house, when memories of other places we have lived come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless that all immemorial things are. We live fixations, fixations of happiness…Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost. (Bachelard, 6) 

Bachelard calls the house a “psychic state” that bespeaks and manifests intimacy. It is within the intimate confines of the house that the individual’s passions “simmer and resimmer in solitude: the passionate being prepares his explosions and his exploits in his solitude” (9). In providing space for dreaming, the house quite literally manifests physical beginnings. The quiet planning and dreaming of man creates a dynamic energy that propels him into the world. This momentum brings new vistas, new homes, which encourages a reintegration of intimacy at each stop along the way. Through the memory and dreams of our solitary past, we ‘bring our lares with us.’ We manifest our past sense of comfort and intimacy into our presently inhabited space. As our poetic imagination develops through this continual reintegration of intimacy, and as our capacity to dream becomes stronger, the solitude and protection the house offers becomes more universal, as all of inhabited space begins to bear the essential mark of home.

Consequently, Bachelard beseeches that one, “should speaks of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor’s map of his lost fields and meadows. Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul.” (11) He further indicates this non-dualism of mind and space, facilitated directly by the dreaming poetic imagination when he assets, “If we attain to the limit at which dream becomes exaggerated, we experience a sort of consciousness of constructing the house [my italics], in the very pains we take to keep it alive, to give it all its essential clarity… Our house apprehended in its dream potentiality, becomes a nest in the world, and we shall live there in complete confidence if, in our dreams, we really participate in the sense of security of our first home” (103). Like a bird’s nest, formed through continuous active pressure and effort, the mind is curated, shaped, and made hospitable by a continual participation in the intimate. As the world perpetually engraves itself on the soul, space and mind become intertwined through the intimacy of home. Indeed, our paths trace the contours of our soul.

Travel, then, retains a profound responsibility in shaping the poetic imagination, and in imbuing intimate security to all of inhabited space. Be it a park bench, a Greyhound bus seat 100 miles from anywhere, or at the summit of a mountain, when far from home, we are compelled to synthesize discomfort and intimacy. The French novelist Albert Camus puts it most eloquently in his lyrical essay on travel:

[Abroad,] man is face to face with himself: I defy him to be happy ... And yet this is how travel enlightens him. A great discord occurs between him and the things he sees. The music of the world finds its way more easily into this heart grown less secure. Finally stripped bare, the slightest solitary tree becomes the most tender and fragile of images. Works of art and women's smiles, races of men at home in their land and monuments that summarize the centuries, this is the moving and palpable landscape that travel consists of. (Camus, 44)

Travel facilities an expansion of the house, the unification of mind and space by means of intimate dreaming. The house transcends its inert physical geometry; it becomes an animated extension of the mind who’s “walls contract and expand as I desire. At times, I draw them close about me like protective armor… But at others, I let the walls of my house blossom out in their own space, which is infinitely extensible” (Spyridaki, 35). The fundamental essence of home finds final refuge in the mind. Travel compels the mind to be “housed everywhere but nowhere shut in” (Bachelard, 62). The image of the house, then, retains an immense cosmic potential insofar as it represents a psychic state, a perpetual modality that grounds the individual via the intimacy that all physical space possesses. “A house that is as dynamic as this allows the poet to inhabit the universe. Or to put it differently, the universe comes to inhabit his house” (Bachelard, 51). When the mind is home, when the road is abode, we can begin the essential work of the perpetual dream.

As Bachelard suggests, poetry is the vehicle of dreaming, the means by which our poetic imagination asserts itself. Street photography grounds its poetic ethos in the beginnings of humankind, providing fresh triggers for dreaming around each corner. The street photographer that renders the road as abode is free to “dream an abstract-concrete daydream” (Bachelard, 28), which actively confers cosmicity to the simplest and seemingly most mundane instances of human or natural activity. The spiral fall of a leaf, the randoneur pausing before turning a corner, the momentary silence of a bustling boulevard, the retiree painting in his garage, all become sincere images for the mind (or lens) that “give us the sensation of our dreams.” The actuality of these occurrences, their unmistakable reality and intimacy, seize and occupy the quieted mind (or camera). In the absence of self, the image plunges the depths of the dreaming soul to then stir its surface (thoughts, memories, or a light sensitive media). The street photograph, captured by mind or camera, represents a discrete instance of a phenomenology of the imagination, as the image elicits the multitude within the dreaming individual.

As such, street photography, à la Dorothea Lange, “cannot be content with a reduction which would make the image a subordinate means of expression: it demands, on the contrary, the images be lived directly, that they be taken as sudden events in life. When the image is new, the world is new” (47). With the street photograph’s inherent rejection of acting as a subordinate means of expression, a great responsibility falls upon the street photographer to meet and cast subjects and individuals on their terms, and in their fullness of actuality. This may be achieved by imbuing all of physical space with the intimate familiarity of home, as the “walls of my [mind] blossom out in their own space, which is infinitely extensible.” Through the erasure of the division between mind and nature in poetic revery, by allowing the cosmos to come to live in the mind, the street photographer is capable of capturing the world in its full actuality, as it is. At peace in all inhabited space, the mind quieted in preparation for poetic revery, “the dreamer [street photographer] can renew his own world, merely by moving his face” (157).

iii.          Lartigue’s Landscape of Dreams: Inner and Exterior Immensity Articulated

“As I stood in contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space, I had the feeling that I was looking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions of my own being; and I smiled, because it had never occurred to me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! My heart burst into singing with the song of grace of the universe. All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality!”                        

- Oscar Milosz, L’amoureuse Initiation  

Supervised by the poetic imagination, the unification of mind and space generates a peculiar sensation.  As a poetic image reverberates through the soul, when the universe comes to inhabit the mind, a radiative joy warms the mind and body. An intensity of being overcomes the senses and sensitives of the individual. How, though, could the outside world be the purveyor of being? Are not human beings the masters of their own being? I will try to answer this odd question through the work and philosophy of the French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue. 

The same vast, radiative warmth surges within us when we are confronted with physical immensity. When the heavens gaze down upon us, it awakens within us a sense of own interior immensity. It triggers a dreaming so intense, it exposes the multitude that comprises us, the multitude which ennobles our creative capacity for “flying off, anarchically, in all directions.” Bachelard calls the radiative joy that accompanies the contemplative gaze unto immensity “an attitude so special, an inner state that is so unlike any other, that the daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity” (Bachelard, 183). And yet immensity contributes an intangible quality to things, a quality that seems to nonetheless generate a phenomenological response without a corresponding phenomenon. The impression or image of immensity, especially as it manifests in the mind, is one that resists a categorical form. It is an essence that supersedes form. Bachelard captures this seeming paradox when he writes, “since immense is not an object, a phenomenology of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness. In analyzing images of immensity, we should realize within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination” (184). Immensity then is not a phenomenon of the world, but a phenomenon of the poetic imagination itself.

As a phenomenon of the poetic imagination, immensity begins within the human mind. Interior immensity tracks a qualitatively similar immensity of the physical world, as it seeks articulation. The poetic imagination creates a dynamic relationship between interior and exterior immensity, employing the forms of nature to articulate itself: “immensity becomes conscious of itself, through man” (196). As interior immensity finds articulation through the forms of nature, being invigorates being. An overwhelming sense of familiarity and intimacy expands within the dreaming individual. A sense of self, founded upon an intimate camaraderie with nature, emerges. In occupying the mind, immensity compels the individual to integrate and begin anew in the face of an ever-expanding vocabulary of forms and their associated beginnings. For example, we re-inaugurate eternal companionship through the physical forms Lartigue’s Dieppe, 1962, as we give flesh to the embracing remains of Vesuvius. Or again in Brittany, 1965, we re-inaugurate that essential quality of companionship through the eyes of schoolchildren dappled in light and cheerful contentment.

The poetic imagination provides humankind with a magnifying glass, one that amplifies and elucidates our being. It articulates our internal immensity through the forms of the universe, as “the exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold” (192). When the individual mind takes pleasure in admiration of the universe, when it dissolves the ego in order to wholly facilitate the image of contemplation in a moment of meditative appreciation, the image expands past its confines toward the realm of dreams and infinity. This is the true cosmic potential of human beings: the simultaneous magnification of self and nature through poetry. The camera then is nothing more than a magnifying glass, an extension of the magnifying being. It serves to assimilate the exterior spectacle with the internal immensity that begs for articulation. It magnifies the details of the grandeur of human beings anarchically flying about. The French photographer Lartigue, master of this assimilation, harnessed the poetic potential of the camera as he was instinctually drawn to “slowness, repetition, and regularity,” qualities of nature that facilitate poetic integration, enabling ‘immensity to become conscious of itself:’

His ‘photographer’s soul’ found an ideal playground in nature, one where spring, the blossoming of a tulip or a poppy, and the arching wild grasses could be photographed by the hour and year after year. He couldn’t get over the “beauty of a cornflower, a blade of grass, and a finch’s conversation” (diary, 1957) … He no longer complained of “having neither the time nor the leisure to listen to a lark’s song. (diary, 1933) He became the lark himself.” (Ravache, 18-19)

In the way that Lartigue became the world he inhabited, Bachelard instructs of the dreaming individual, “we should have to learn how to meditate very slowly, to experience the inner poetry of the [form], the inner immensity of a [form]. All important [forms], all the [forms] marked for grandeur by a poet, are keys to the universe, to the dual universe of the Cosmos and the depths of the human spirit” (Bachelard, 198). Immensity dwells in the cooperative universe of man and cosmos, elicited by their union, facilitated by the poetic imagination at quiet ease. When man’s being is elevated by this collision and union, he is further dynamized toward increased being, toward creation. “This being the case, in this meditation, we are not “cast into the world,” since we open the world, as it were, by transcending the world seen as it is, or as it was, before we started dreaming. And even if we are aware of our own paltry selves – through the effects of harsh dialectics – we become aware of grandeur. We then return to the natural activity of our magnifying being” (184). Opening being by opening the world.

With camera in hand, creation and being are made one as the photographer inaugurates the self by means of objects. Acts of inauguration are crystalized by the photograph, presenting an indexical object of the immensity captured when mind and space became one. “It then becomes clear that works of art are the by-products of this existentialism of the imagining being. In this direction of daydreams of immensity, the real product is consciousness of enlargement. We feel that we have been promoted to the dignity of admiring being” (Bachelard, 184). Creation and life are synergized in the act of magnifying. We experience an elevation through this kind of creation, and from such a view we may marvel at reality pulled upward.

Lartigue’s masterfully evocative images reveal to us ourselves, by means of his individual song of immensity. What makes Lartigue so successful toward this end is his total dissolution of ego, as inner and exterior immensity merge in the linguistic symbolism of his images. He becomes the world. Lartigue writes “I’m in love with light. I’m in love with the sun, I’m in love with shade, I’m in love with rain (because rain, for photography, is something wonderful). I’m in love with everything” (Ravache, 52). Lartigue’s images of his life partner Florette are particularly palpable with a caressing radiance, as if he indeed were the light dappling her skin. We feel the warmth of our poetic imagination inaugurating Lartigue’s love of nature and Florette, as our own sense of inner immensity expands in the light of his inaugurating spirit.

The appreciation of the miraculous essence of self and nature is the song of immensity. That radiative sensation of joy is exterior meeting interior, as their union facilitates a new beginning. Lartigue’s photographs provide an exquisite window into his individual song of immensity. We view, and make our own, his pervasive appreciation for the immense world as it instructs and articulates his interior immensity. When we see his love Florette, when we see the children of Brittany flecked with sunlight, we hear exterior and interior immensity harmonize. We internalize their immensity as we are moved to further elucidate our own.

Poetry explores the fundamental question, “what is the world like?” It replaces the surgical reductionism of science with an appreciation for the whole as it shines forth, particularly as interpreted by the individual mind. The poetic imagination is a cosmic, human force that not only allows us to make sense of the world, but to make sense of our place within it. And yet the poetic imagination further arouses us. It motivates our action as it gives voice to the essential passion that burns within each of us, colored uniquely by our memories, tastes, values, hopes, and dreams. The street photographer, lover of life, nature, and the unfixed nature of individuals, captures the objects that give sonority to their individual song of immensity. The objects of the world instruct as much as they manifest, galvanizing a creative freedom, a series of pure beginnings, synonymous with the act of life itself.   

WORKS CITED

Bachelard, Gaston. Poetics of Space. Book. Beacon Press, Boston, 1969.

Bourke-White, Margaret. Worlds Highest Standard of Living. Photograph. 1937.

Camus, Albert. Lyrical and Critical Essays. Book. Vintage, 1970.

Eisenstaedt, Alfred. VJ Day In Times Square. Photograph. 1945.

Lange, Dorothea. Migrant Mother. Photograph. 1936.

Milosz, Oscar. Amorous Initiation: A Novel of Sacred and Profane Love. Book. Inner Traditions, 1993.

Ravache, Martine and Martine d'Astier. Lartigue: Life in Color. Book & Anthology. Abrams, New York, 2015.

Scott, Clive. Street Photography – From Atget to Cartier-Bresson. Book. I.B. Tauris, London, 2007.

Spyridaki, Georges. Mort Lucide. Book. Séghers, Paris, 1953.