الحقيقة الفوتوغرافية مع صخور عبر العصور .. مجلة فن التصوير اللبنانية _ ع٥٨

Photographic truth with rocks through the ages

Photography is a wide sea that we constantly dive in to find everything new in its world, and this time we will see a fictional world in front of us ... made by photographers who have gone beyond everything that is ordinary and even traditional in the world of the image.

In the breathtaking and bone-chilling movie “Koya Anisikatsi” produced in 1983.
Italian director Godfrey Laeggio and American composer Philip Glass teamed up to comment on the frenzied human path from an ancient crushing system to contemporary chaos. Writers Paul Caponigro and Marilyn Bridges also sought in their books Megalitz and Markings, respectively, to capture what can best be described. It is the opposite, kopa anisikatsi, the word of the Hopi Indian language which means: crazy life, chaotic life, imbalance, or disintegration. By carefully turning their cameras towards the huge stone pillars left over from ancient civilizations, these two skilled photographers reached back to the time of the Koya Anisikatsi, as the pinnacle of balance was, to explore worlds and order.

Properly capturing the symbols of such an era to captivate the mind is a very big challenge, but photography - with its ability to protect time - seems an appropriate field for the task. However, there is a greater challenge than simply recording the appropriate light or focus on the rich structure of a particular rock formation, so that it becomes more than mere documents. Archaeological images of massive boulders, craters, and massive vertical figures on mountainsides should reveal a kind of archetype of meaning between the photographer and his lifeless subject—even if that meaning is ultimately impossible to emerge.

In his book “Megalites,” Caponigro, who began photographing the ancient Celtic stone structures of England and Ireland nearly twenty years ago, intends to describe his western encounters with rocks that transcend time in their age, and to write in detail about the strangeness of The extraterrestrial sensations he felt in front of those structures. It was this personal experience that he wanted to recreate in his photographs, and he succeeded in, especially in some fearless English and Irish nature alongside grazing cows, knotty trees and endless fields. However, Caponigro often exaggerates the approach, creating a framework for his subjects with stony faces that excludes their meaningful surroundings. It is precisely in these terrifying confrontations that Caponigro's interest in form obscures the actual realities that forms can contain.
What differentiates those photographs that reveal the mystery of the huge stone structures from those other images that do not give the same impression is Caponigro's ability to wake up the target who has been asleep for a long time for those stones. Avery Stone Circle, as in another series made in «Stuffhenge».

We see the structures first while they are shaded against a cloudy sky, then in different angles in terms of their relationship with each other and with the countryside. In these images Caponigro stands apart from the more obvious subject, thus allowing a larger story to be revealed. Spanning distant fields and lush skies, he captures the intrinsic energy of rocks as beautiful natural targets.

These Caponigro themes are rigid and immobile to the maximum extent possible, and from here it seems impossible for
The photographer should get lost in recording it properly. But, as every artist knows, there is a kind of movement in even the most static things, and Caponigro writes flowery about his feelings and self-beliefs that move him, and it is easy to seduce us with his flowing prose that almost puts us in a kind of hypnosis. Despite all this, his images only sometimes succeed in expressing the inspiring feelings he describes.
The text succeeds in supporting the images when Caponigro repeats some of the different theories that have been developed to explain the meaning of these huge rocky stalagmites. Monuments served as burial sites, as it is said about some stone complexes that they served as substitutes for mythical figures: dancers and trumpeters petrified because they violated the laws of the sacred day of the week: fighters turned into stones during battle: shells from the devil fell before their target. Such myths, some of which are narrated by Caponigro, and others found in notes at the back of the book, give an element of relief to a restless mood: that these rocks are above all commercial figures or prehistoric storytellers.

This, and although Caponigro sometimes fails to provide evidence of cosmic designs, Marilyn Bridges' views of the Colombian landforms and Indian sites more than compensate for that. By capturing it sometimes from a plane flying from a low altitude of up to 200 feet above the ground at times. This means that Bridges is running from what John Tzarkowski has called "a remarkable distance... That little description, Bridges can see the overwhelming footprints - snakes." Snails - as they were meant to be seen.

Bridges's photographs evoke feelings of wonder often absent from Caponigro's photographs, and although few photographers choose such complex proportions based on low flight, Bridges's work contains more than the boldness of flight, as when he shoots in the early morning and late afternoon Usually, she finds the right light and shadows to make her photos more readable, and her appropriate angles not only help to capture the shadowy effects.
In its entirety, and even salutes its dramatic and beautiful self-contents in most cases. As if we were led with our eyes closed to the edge of a rock, then the blindfolds were removed from our eyes and we were simply asked to look up and so from that height and those generous dimensions, and witness the awe-inspiring intention of these earthly designs.
Bridges and Caponigro both describe moments of sublime awareness when they feel as if their images are creating a response to a great unknown, or, Caponigro says, as if his film was being consumed by the subject.

Caponigro, who was once an ardent fan of the mystical photography pioneer Mynor White, comes with all the makings of doing his façades like an actor ready to turn heads on stage. As for Bridges's words, we understand that she was on a routine mission in Peru when she found herself driven towards more self-attachment with earthen excavations. However, this Bridgez whose inspiration helps her make her pictures from an airplane, and although she also pilots planes, she doesn't drive and photograph at the same time, captures inspiration in the shapes she sees.

Both books evoke a sense of awe because they both delve deeply into the fears and solaces of bygone times, and although they do not come close to solving the mysteries raised by their images, they provide: a poignant glimpse into the depths of a prehistoric past that is well-organized, a past the like of which modern civilization will not know despite all Its advanced features⏹