When I was young and impressed by people who knew how to construct sentences that elicit powerful emotions, I tried to make a deal with God — give Borges my eyesight and give me his writing talent. I was dead serious. But God must have had other things on her mind and never even acknowledged my offer.
Later, when my interest in photography grew, I realized why I was so attracted to Borges’s fiction — it is immersively photographic.
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know,”
Diane Arbus
Little critical attention has been paid to Borges' photographic eye. The man was blind, but his true vision possessed a visual clarity surpassing that of most sighted artists. The narratives he created had a hyper-realistic quality, not unlike that of a photograph capturing a moment in time.
Take his famous short story “The Aleph”. In it, Borges introduces a fantastical object, the Aleph, which serves as a lens through which the protagonist, Borges himself as a character in the story, experiences a mind-blowing convergence of all points in space.
With its vivid imagery - the environment, the surroundings, the details — Borges paints a picture of the Aleph's chamber, its eerie glow, and the sense of awe and wonder it inspires in the protagonist. This attention to visual detail mirrors the way a photograph captures a specific moment or scene with clarity and precision.
Like a photograph, "The Aleph" offers a frozen moment in time, albeit one imbued with profound philosophical and metaphysical implications. Through the Aleph, Borges explores themes of infinity, perception, and the nature of reality, inviting readers to contemplate the vastness of existence and the limitations of human understanding. Just as a photograph can capture a fleeting moment and preserve it for eternity, "The Aleph" captures a singular, transcendent experience.
And, like a photograph, which frames a particular perspective of reality, the Aleph provides a unique viewpoint that reveals hidden truths and dimensions beyond ordinary perception.
In another story, "El Milagro Secreto" ("The Secret Miracle"), Jaromir Hladík, a writer in Prague, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and accused of being an anti-Nazi. Just an instant before his execution God grants Hladik his wish — one year to complete his composition “The Enemies.” According to Dan Russek,
In front of the firing squad, Hladik "absurdamente, recordó las vacilaciones preliminares de losfotógrafos" (512) (absurdly, he remembered the preliminary hesitations of the photographer.) The reference, while topically equating a photographic shot to a violent event, is ironic. The soldiers who are about to kill him seem to "immortalize" him in a picture. The allusion is premonitory as well, because the execution scene will lead, after all, to a photographic stoppage of time, and thus an interruption of his death. Hladik's situation recalls the techniques of holding fast sitters in the long sessions of exposure during the first years of photography, as those sitters were subjected to long exposure times in order to have their picture taken, Hladik also has to undergo, doubly tied to the scaffold, a prolonged stillness to finish his poem. (p.75)
For Hladík, only an instant had passed since he had made his prayer to God. However, in that instant, he had lived a year in his mind, completing his poem and finding redemption through his art.
After the miraculous intervention, Hladík was taken away and executed. But at that moment, he had experienced a secret miracle that transcended time and space, leaving behind a legacy of artistic perfection and spiritual enlightenment.
In The Ongoing Moment, a terrific journey through the history of photography, the writer Geoff Dyer talks about Diane Arbus’s fascination with the blind and with violating human privacy, by intention (at least according to the writer Eudora Welty, who accused her of that). So it’s no surprise that Arbus wanted to photograph Borges.
“The blind can’t fake their expressions. They don’t know what their expressions are, so there’s no mask.”
Diane Arbus
“It could be argued to the contrary that the start frontality and frankness of her method was was exploitative than the surreptitious strategies pioneered by Strand and Evans. Consistent with this, her usual practice, Borges is placed in the exact center of the frame and stares directly at the camera, fully conscious of the process of which he is part.” (Dyer, p.42)
Arbus’s friend Richard Avedon wanted to photograph Borges too.
”I photograph what I most afraid of, and Borges was blind,” Avedon famously said.
In her profile of Avedon for The New York Times (September 7, 1975), Carol Lawson describes Avedon’s trip to Buenos Aires to photograph Borges.
“During the all‐night flight, he reread a lapful of Borges's paperbacks. When he arrived in South America, Avedon learned that Borges's mother, with whom the writer had lived all his life, died just before he landed. Borges agreed to go ahead with the sitting anyway.
‘While my assistant was setting up the lights and equipment—it took about an hour—Borges and I talked about death—his mother's death, deaths of other people in his family, ways of dying, the death of my own father. A very strange thing happened. Instead of this conversation bringing us closer together, it created a greater and greater distance. This sitting was so full of intensity and had in it every element for a powerful portrait. But instead, the portrait is icy cold and empty of what I'd hoped would be there.
‘I almost didn't hang the Borges portrait in the show, but I think it is valid. I placed it next to Stravinsky. The two are similar—contained, held back.’
Lawson, Karen. The New York Times. September 7, 1975.
Dyers, Geoff. The Ongoing Moment. Vintage Books. 2005
Russek, Dan. Borges' Photographic Fictions. Hispanic Journal, Vol. 31 / No.2 (Fall 2010), pp (67-80)
A pdf of The Aleph, by J.L. Borges
A pdf of The Secret Miracle, by J.L. Borges
Video. Infinity According to Jorge Luis Borges
Video: Masters of Photography: Diane Arbus (1972)
Video: Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light (1996)
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Thanks for reading and being a subscriber.
’Till next time.
ak
Enjoyed this especially the stories behind the Borges portraits.
The eternity we live in the moment before death.