Viridiana Morandini: POGO

•

Publication

Text by Rubén Lardín

There’s something fleeting in the act of taking a photograph, a kind of hush, a wish not to disturb, coupled with the impossible ambition of capturing everything. To sneak it. Make it seem like an accident, but walk away with the whole world. But of course, you never can.

And once those mute images exist, what do we do with them? For the photographer, they become fragments of the self not previously known, places within us that reveal themselves, that show us who we are. We think we’re portraying the world, but what we’re really offering is just our gaze, bundled like a posy, reality broken down into elemental moments, like an inventory. After all, a photo album has always been a dotted line, the outline of a life.

In Viridiana Morandini’s name, all those i’s stand like fence posts, enclosing a private plot where all these experiences of hers unfold, this luminous and tender first book,where the images are always now, enduring, all fresh air and abundant water, time that, in time, will become time. But there are other times in these pages too. There is after, for instance – naps taken after love, footprints in the mud and snow, the thawing out of things, a goalpost shattered by too many shots, all that playing. There are golden hours, a gentle strain of melancholy, and something distant and romantic, almost funereal. And then there ‘s the prelude: dreaded and blessed injections, a pregnant woman, a dog approaching. Sleeping souls, or maybe still drifting into slumber, and the whole planet held still in the silhouette of a black horse aligned with the horizon. That kind of thing. Life, sometimes a prelude, what comes after.

To see the invisible is exhausting. To see everything – unbearable. Ray Milland proved this in that old film The Man with X-Ray Eyes. B-movies are a bubbling cauldron of metaphors, serving them up like fruit in a bowl. What in Spanish is called naturaleza muerta, in English, still life. Words are pure intelligibility, or not, what do I know?, though sometimes ideas show themselves as images, and when they do, we shouldn’t pester them with this extra chatter. But Viridiana gave me a camera, and all I have in return are these lines, a poor exchange, really, unfair to her quiet, gentle photography, which in its best moments breathes life into the symbolist theory of correspondences: a forest clearing where the visible world meets the unseen one halfway.

We believe we photograph life or time, but to photograph – truly photograph – is something else altogether…That verb has always struggled to hold. It doesn’t quite work, because when we talk about photography, words are already too much. There’s this mistaken idea that picture books aren’t read, that they’re only looked at – untouchable books, celibate books no one ever takes to bed. Why would they? But the pulse of this book lies in a kind of foretelling, and in some little piglets, and in knowing that the answers are never in plain sight. A photo is taken, made, captured – always in silence. And every gaze carries its own worldview, its own memory, its own endless deviations. And photographing, in the truest sense, can’t ever be put into words. What can be done, perhaps, is to anoint one’s own reality – and, on rare occasions, to interpret it in the only way possible: by dancing.