“The Photographs I Love” 16 — Pinkhassov

“It is foolish to change the vector of chaos.
You shouldn’t try to control it, but fall into it.”
(Gueorgui Pinkhassov)

Gueorgui Pinkhassov. 
Ueno Tube Station. 
Tokyo, Japan1996

David Gibson in his fundamental book on the masters of Street Photography, to describe the charm of Pinkhassov's photographs, refers to the famous “punctum” by Roland Barthes, or the particular in an image that stimulates our conscience, and also acts in our unconscious, making us tied to that image, even without the need to see it, forcing us to return to it over and over again. 

“Born in Moscow in 1952, Pinkhassov’s interest in photography began while he was still at school. After studying cinematography at the VGIK (The Moscow Institute of Cinematography), he went on to work at the Mosfilm studio as a cameraman and then as an on-set photographer. He joined the Moscow Union of Graphic Artists in 1978, which allowed him more freedom to travel and exhibit internationally.”

It can be read on the website of the Magnum Photos agency of which he has been a member since 1988.

“Gueorgui Pinkhassov is known for his vivid art reportage, which elevates the every day to the extraordinary. His richly-colored images are absorbing, complex, and poetic – sometimes bordering on an abstraction which embraces the visual complexity of contemporary life.”

 

Gueorgui Pinkhassov

The photograph I love most is also one of his most famous, taken from the book “Sightwalk” (1998), which tells, through details, abstractions, and particular types of light, his vision of the city of Tokyo.

It's a photo of a woman at the Tokyo subway station, taken in 1996.

The woman is beyond the glass, as often happens in his images, which use objects and glass as a filter. In the night.

The reflections of the red lights on the surface look like stars.

One of the merits – and of the burdens, as an artistic form – that  Photography has is to kidnap us from our daily realities, to grant us a fragment of fantasy. If it's true that it was born as an even more faithful representation of reality than painting, and a powerful way of witnessing what is happening in the world, it can also be an abstraction.

Not only Pinkhassov, but there have been many photographers who have also understood Street Photography as a form of escape from the slavish representation of what was before their eyes.

They played with shapes and colors: go and see the photos of Trent Park, Shin Noguchi, Jack Simon, Bruno Quinquet, Moriyama, not to mention the heavy debt that this photograph pays to a classic like Saul Leiter.

 

Gueorgui Pinkhassov.
France, Town of Lille,
EuraLille, 2000

There is a very interesting debate within cultural Anthropology, linked to a classic 1949 study by Levi-Strauss on symbolic efficacy, to which the anthropologist Carlo Severi replied in 1998 who, reflecting on the ritual efficacy, studied a projective process, particularly frequent in prehistoric and primitive art, on the basis of which images are created, iconic or behavioral, capable of evoking even what they do not contain and are limited only to suggesting.

The process requires the presence of an empty area, suitable to become the projection screen of the viewer.

An absolutely interesting topic, but what does this have to do with the photography I'm talking about, you may be wondering.

I believe that our eyes, and our minds, act not too differently when looking at the woman in the Tokyo subway.

Everything appears vague, indefinite, just “suggested”, so that our emotions can get lost in the constellation of the luminous thoughts of that unknown woman.

He offers us a screen that is not empty but colored, like a starry sky, on which we can be wrecked in docility, as sang a famous Italian poet.

 

Gueorgui Pinkhassov.
Barcelona, 2017

It is a photograph that is deeply poetic and poignant for me, which makes me love images and their power.

Indeed, it sometimes seems foolish to control the chaos, not only of life itself but also that of our emotions, much better to fall into it.

There is no freedom stronger than feeling emotions and riding our imagination.

As Pinkhassov also writes, fantasy is to take new unknown paths.

This is one of the lessons that art has always given to human beings.

 

“The power of our Muse lies in her meaninglessness. Even the style can turn one into a slave if one does not run away from it, and then one is doomed to repeat oneself. The only thing that counts is curiosity. For me personally, this is what creativity is about.

It will express itself less in the fear of doing the same thing over again than in the desire not to go where one has already been”

(Gueorgui Pinkhassov)

 

Gueorgui Pinkhassov.
Tokyo, Japan, 1996

Gueorgui Pinkhassov

David Gibson: “Street Photography – Photographer's Manual”(Quintet Publishing, 2014)

Italian version