LIGATURE: A Text By Ashraf Jamal
A thing that tightly binds is an odd descriptor to apply to photographs that are pointedly abstract and layered in their complexity. And yet a ligature is an apt word to apply to Barry Salzman’s photographs of the killing fields of Poland, Ukraine, Rwanda, Namibia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. It is not only their ephemeral sheen that matters when regarding Salzman’s photographs of glades and forests, but their hidden content – the uncountable and unnameable dead that lie beneath their fecund and shimmering surface.
Robert Pogue Harrison, the author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation, and Dominion of the Dead, understands the intimate relationship between surface and depth, presence and absence, and the nature of this fold in our understanding of who and what we are. ‘Human beings … are always already dead’, he notes. ‘This … knowledge of finitude predetermines their most creative as well as their most destructive acts’. It is this acute awareness of the Janus face of humanity which allows Salzman’s photographs to teeter on the brink of atrocity and grace.
Between the dead and the unborn there is the living – you and I – whose lives are implacably determined by the choices we make. If Salzman elides a direct engagement with atrocity, it is not because he seeks to suppress it, but because he understands that ‘decadence begins with the loss of restraint’, which is why it must be tempered. His photographs are the ligatures that bind our forked nature – our darkness and our light. Before them we intimate the cruelty beneath the beauty, know that we cannot accept ourselves without accepting the evil that stalks us. ‘There exists an allegiance between the dead and the unborn of which we the living are merely the ligature’, Robert Pogue Harrison notes. A photograph – posthumous, an afterlife – traffics across this strait.
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ASHRAF JAMAL is a Research Associate in the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, University of Johannesburg. He is the co-author of Art in South Africa: The Future Present, and the author of Love themes for the wilderness, The Shades, Predicaments of Culture in South Africa, In the World: Essays on Contemporary South African Art, and Strange Cargo: Essays on Art.