The Ancient Light: “My Bangladesh” Photo Series (2)

"I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes." (Vladimir Nabokov)

Shyam Bazar, Old Dhaka. Dhaka, 12 February 2020

Old Dhaka is the part of this city that I loved most. Chaotic, crowded, narrow streets. I must have gone there at least a dozen times, but the first time was the one I remember most. Right there is the printing house of the publisher of my book, Agamee Prakashani. So I was there to see how they print and bind the books by hand.

Seeing this has already fascinated me as being timeless. Then, I asked if I can go around and see the area that immediately attracted me when I see it from the car. So they gave me a guy to guide me and we went. Better to say that he was following behind me, careful that I did not get lost in the maze of the streets. But I was already lost among the faces and colors, and the hustle and bustle of the streets. Whereupon I asked to see the market, because wherever I go the market is the place that I love the most.

We approached the market called Shyam Bazar, between small shops and trucks that unloaded the goods to sell: an explosion of sounds, voices, smells and colors. Unbelievable. Then I entered into an internal square to take a breath from the congested road, and I found in a quieter atmosphere and more space to move.

In this situation, I do not think. The eyes think, the skin, the feet. But the brain, I prefer to leave it under the pillow, as Josef Koudelka said.

I let myself be guided by my feet and instinct. So I followed some men who carried big bags on their heads, also because the boy who was with me told me that there was an indoor part of the market that connected to the outside, to the Buriganga river.

Even these words evoked dozens and dozens photographs stored in my emotional memory and in the visual shelves of so many years as a lover of photography: Raghubir Singh, Raghu Rai, Mary Ellen Mark, Alex Webb and McCurry's India, the Bangladesh of Shahidul Alam and Daniel Schwartz. I grew up photographically thanks to their images and, along with it, my love for Asia.

When we are in places that we love, I believe, there is always an unconscious baggage of images accumulated over the years that, like a prism, cloak our eyes. It is inevitable.

The present moment that we are looking at is also the result of many images of the past, which can be a movement, a color, a drawing, a stone, and which defines “how” we look. The philosopher Bergson in his essay “Substance and Memory” theorized how memory of the past is more important than intuition of the present and, therefore, “perceiving ends up being nothing more than an occasion to remember”.

This is also translated unconsciously, later, when we look at ours or the photographs of others and which has to do with the famous “punctum” of Roland Barthes: that unconscious and changeable element from person to person that leads us to remember and look continuously at a photograph, without knowing the reason, until it then becomes an awareness.

I saw the men enter a front porch between the walls of the square, and I followed them.

I was in a new atmosphere, suddenly empty, a courtyard that led to the indoor market, and there I took this photograph. I can't stop looking at it. It has something magical, indefinite. I don't understand, what is it?

It's the light. What a particular, strange light, with the coincidence of the shades of the walls, the wood and the ground, among gold and brown, seems to be sepia by itself. The more I look at the light, the more it leads me out of time. Okay, this light is ancient, it seems to come from another century, it makes everything suddenly “past”.

It's not the light and colors of all photographers mentioned before who have told places like this, so temporally close to me and to us. No. If I had to try to tell this light and what it suggests, I would have to go much further back and get to one of the historical periods and artistic movements with which I am truly passionate: Italian Pictorialism.

An artistic trend that had its splendor between the end of the nineteenth and the first twenty years of the twentieth century, that combined photography and painting, with “a precise aesthetic concept in order to legitimize photography, through technical interventions in the development and printing that they differed from the mere representation of reality, as an artistic expression in the same way as painting and drawing”, as described in the book that tells the art of Peretti Griva, the most famous Italian pictorialist together with Guido Rey.

The light in those works, for example this one by Ezio Benigni, is a light that I love deeply, because it collects in itself a whole series of characteristics that the dictionary of synonyms would serve: melancholic, tenuous, romantic, evocative, and ancient, yes.

Ezio Benigni, "The Sasso Washhouse (Bordighera)" circa 1907. 
Gelatin silver print. Turin, private photo-historical archive.

A light painted in silver salts have the power to take that moment of life in the market and, with a simple sepia passage, bring it back a century. And so do we, who look at it.

I can't find any other explanation as to why I go back to look at this photo every day, with pleasure. My “punctum” is there. In that ray of light that comes from the last century, and gives me a fragment of parallel life, before returning to the din of screams and horns, on the bank of the great Buriganga river.

Roland Barthes, “La camera chiara. Nota sulla fotografia” (Einaudi, 2003)

H. Bergson, "Materia e memoria. Saggio sulla relazione del corpo allo spirito”, in H. Bergson, Opere, 1889-1896, di F. Sossi, a cura di P. A. Rovatti (Mondadori, 1986)

“Il Pittorialismo italiano, e l'opera fotografica di Peretti Griva”a cura di Marco Antonetto ad Dario Reteuna (Silvana Editoriale, 2017)