Observer

In every age there have been people who stand slightly apart and watch. He is one of them. He has wrapped himself in sackcloth, the poorest cloth there is, and crowned himself with a tall hat of the same, tied with rope. His face is gone behind the weave. All that is left of it is a pair of brass lenses, and he keeps turning one of them with his fingers, bringing something into focus that the rest of us have not yet noticed. Tubes and leather straps run over his chest. He has built himself into an instrument for seeing. He does not hunt for subjects. That is the first thing people get wrong about watchers. A real subject is never found. It ripens inside the one who watches, slowly, like fruit, until one day it demands to be born, and he has no more choice in the matter than a woman in labour. He is not the master of what he makes. He is its servant. And when you strip away from human work everything that is done for profit, for rank, for the approval of others, what remains is very small, and very stubborn. It is this: someone standing on a stone stair in the half-dark, adjusting his lens, because he cannot do otherwise. This is the photographer as the collection sees him, a Stalker in the zone of his own house: a winding stair of natural stone, and a man who cannot do otherwise. "If you exclude from human activity everything connected with making a profit, only art will remain." "It is wrong to say that an artist 'searches' for his theme. The theme ripens in him like a fruit and begins to demand expression. The poet has nothing to be proud of: he is not the master of the situation, he is a servant." Andrei Tarkovsky A bow to a true artist. (Fine Art Photography. Created in 2020.)