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PHOTOGRAPHY 17
that a good photograph can so powerfully evoke."05 [Illus. 1] Now melancholy as an inner disposition not only makes elegiac objects seem attractive but carries still another, more important implication: it favors self-estrangement, which on its part entails identification with all kinds of objects. The dejected individual is likely to lose himself in the incidental configurations of his environment, absorbing them with a disinterested intensity no longer determined by his previous preferences. His is a kind of receptivity which resembles that of Proust's photographer cast in the role of a stranger. Film makers often exploited this intimate relationship between melancholy and the photographic approach in an attempt to render visible such a state of mind. A recurrent film sequence runs as follows: the melancholy character is seen strolling about aimlessly: as he proceeds, his changing surroundings take shape in the form of numerous juxtaposed shots of house facades, neon lights, stray passers-by, and the like. It is inevitable that the audience should trace their seemingly unmotivated emergence to his dejection and the alienation in its wake.
The formative tendency may not only become so weak that the resultant prints just barely fulfill the minimum requirement, but it may also take on proportions which threaten to overwhelm the realistic tendency. During the last few decades many a noted photographer has indulged in pictures which are either meant to explore the given raw material or serve to project inner images of their authors, or both. Characterizing a photograph of tree trunks with eye-like hollows in their bark, Moholy-Nagy observed: "The surrealist often finds images in nature which express his feelings."66 Or think of Moholy-Nagy's own picture, From Berlin Wireless Tower [Illus. 2] and certain abstract or near-abstract compositions which on closer inspection reveal themselves to be rock and soil formations, unconventional combinations of objects, faces in big close-up, and what not. [Illus. 3]
In pictures of this type the balance between empathy and spontaneity is rather fragile. The photographer producing them does not subordinate his formative impulses to his realistic intentions but seems eager to manifest both of them with equal vigor. He is animated, perhaps without being aware of it, by two conflicting desires— the desire to externalize his inner images and the desire to render outer shapes. However, in order to reconcile them, he relies on occasional coincidences between those shapes and images. Hence the ambiguity of such photographs, which are a veritable tour de force. A good case in point is Mary Ann Dorr's photograph, Chairs in the Sunlight.™ [Illus. 4] On the one hand, it does justice to the properties of the medium: the perforated chairs and the shadows they cast do exist. On the other, it is palpably intended as an artistic creation: the