Michel Szulc Krzyzanowski

Saturday, September 6, 1997

For a long time, Michel Szulc-Krzyzanowski has been working with the proportions between his body and the landscape. On deserted beaches, while using his own long limbs and the immense vastness, images are created on which body and shadow are stretched as measuring tape of tangible space. The connection between the artist’s body and the universe.
As such, the body becomes a giant compass, which stretches further than the eye can behold, due to the sun’s game.
The artist as land surveyor of space.
After a period of three years, his new series come in colour. Quite justly, since the contrast between split shadows and overwhelming light no longer forms his subject.
Using colour implies another dimension of sensitivity.
And neither because colour simply is an inseparable part of external reality - aesthetically speaking, colour even diminishes our perception of things - nor because this leads to a colour pallet which is more pleasant to the beholder’s eye.
In this case, colour serves to emphasise surfaces with subtle proportions. This leads to the information of the image, while the various particles of that image blend together in perfect harmony.
At first sight, these images touch you because of their correct division of the surface and their clear line pattern. You are confronted with a precise mosaic, which is much more complex than its initial simplicity lets you believe. And while looking at these compositions, you cannot help but thinking of abstract art, although they are photos, hence representations of reality.
Still, “abstract art” is the term which can be used when words fail to describe, no matterhow tangible things might be.
It is a constant unity of objects, or rather, forms, or better still, the proportion between those forms, for which no language knows a word.
And yet, you can see them, comprehend them, and, to a certain extent, even discuss them.
These pictures offer you a visual composition with a quenching and blissful effect.
Still, the image offers more, and when you look carefully, you experience the second instantaneous exposure. You feel you have to pass beyond this first look, even though this first look as such makes sense.
Up until now, the attention has been solely drawn by the first two dimensions of space, but since this concerns testimonials of reality, a third dimension needs to be involved.
Certain similarities or differences between the coloured patches, the tangibility of the sunlit or shaded sand, already push your eyes into this direction.
Delicate touches of light which brush the surface indicate a certain thinness. The body of Michel Szulc-Krzyzanowski might no longer be detectable in the images, but he is present in the thought behind them. And the inevitable question emerges: “How did he do it ?”
This is an ambivalent question, stupid and intellugent at the same time. Stupid since the artist has followed his own path, the how and why of that path is his business, and his business alone.
In art, only the result matters.
Intelligent since developments and attitudes become works of art themselves. But, as so many said before me, Imd like to emphasise “occasionally become”; after all, it happens so rarely, because it is so difficult.
When developments and attitudes do not become works of art, the beholder is merely soothed with an empty shell of vanity.
In this case however, you feel that you have to understand the thought behind the work in order to fully appreciate the result. These images therefore teach you that you always have to look carefully, that things are not always what they appear to be.
Because of this, the beholder is more than merely a beholder, you feel yourself becoming one with the artist, during his search for creation.
As the beholder, you share the discoveries of the artist, or at least to some extent.
And you now recognise glass plates, or mirrors, in various positions, a stick and its shadow, layers which become lines and lengths which become points, “real” sand and the reflection of sand, reflections in reflections. Mentally, you discover and follow the ingenious curves the artist took to reach the unity of reality and illusion.
You discover how he succeeded in capturing images by staging them in a fight with objects - how he can make believe that the impossible still happens unexpectedly.
And the ease with which he has placed his markings, which makes me lose mine.
I feel my mind expanding, meeting the mind of another, who is both subtle and calculating.
Is this what they call “conceptual art” ? That, behind the closed surface of pictures, you experience the joy of personally getting to know the artist, in spite of technical restrictions?
That a man emerges in these works of art, a man who is never visually present, but who rather hides behind optics and line patterns?
This is a precious, delightful moment, but isn’t it also related to childish pleasure, being excited about solving the riddle? Is this second instantaneous exposure the ultimate, peerless moment?
Two considerations stop me from drawing this conclusion. First of all because I quite often simply don’t understand how it is done. I give up. And at the same time, I know it doesn’t matter. That the really important things lie elsewhere.
The success of an exhibition by Michel Szulc-Krzyzanowski could not be measured by looking at the amount of visitors who have solved the riddle of his working method. The best visitor would be the one who succeeded the most in understanding the beauty of these images, without “understanding anything”.
Secondly, because reconstructing mental processes and techniques have not led to anything. It merely concerns self-conceited pride. And these works definitely do not relate to that.
“He has placed two mirrors in an angle of 45 degrees. He then placed a stick in such a fashion that the shadow of that stick forms a symmetrical slope. He took the picture upsidedown. And other bizarre tricks…?”
Now we’re getting somewhere ! Would I be able to make Michel Szulc-Krzyzanowskims pictures anew?
What would be the use, after all, he already made them. Besides, I wouldn’t succeed.
The final result would contain that small difference which leads to the recognition of quality in an image.
The wonderful balance between the proportions would always be mssing, that particular balance which only the artist has found.
A single thought as such can never be the object of aesthetic contemplation, that privilege belongs to matter.
The second instantaneous exposure, during which the riddle is solved, demystifies the illusion. But the direct and objective truth which emerged from the first instantaneous exposure, remains unharmed.
A first exposure which might have been ignorant, but which did not assume anything either, since all form of interpretation had yet to follow.
The second instantaneous exposure has stimulated and enlarged my sensitivity by allowing me to enter the delicate and precise intelligence of the artist.
But all the previous merely concerns means, means which I do not need to reach the thrid level in watching: simply watching what is there, forms in space. I’m not confronted with anything else. And the more this realisation grabs me, the more depth I discover.
Space, depth: all of a sudden I notice that these are actually the key words. I finally discover that, thanks to the second exposure during which I concentrated on the image, I have now learned the essence of the works, i.e. space.
Space is a direct and complete datum, both in visual art and in reality - whether or not classical perspective is visible or invisible.
This “third dimension” has been present from the very start. The original goal of the work is to reveal this presence, with lines, colours and contrasts.
You can therefore wonder why this is called the “third dimension”, since this aspect is clearly and constantly present, as the first, as the origin.
Thanks to finding the correct proportion between forms, thanks to the depth of space, Michel Szulc-Krzyzanowski, with his own means which are nobody’s business, has placed beauty in his work. Objective and universal beauty.
We have to learn to simply feel, departing from the image, by placing less emphasis on intellectual side steps, which are sometimes useful, but never indispensable and always external.
Let us simply approach this fascinating presence.

Jean-Claude Lemagny
Paris, January 1998

Thursday, September 7, 1995

Photography might be said to be the coincidence of object, light and time recorded as a fixed image. The object, whether it be a spatial configuration, a personality, a crowd, the appearance of a natural or of an experimental phenomenon, or a mere thing, has received the lion’s share of attention in photography as a whole.
Light ranks second and time a distant third.
The history of photography is remarkably lacking in examples of photographers who have developed a personal sense or understanding of time as it relates to their medium. Most of them checked their curiosities with their ability to stop motion through the technology of modern cameras and light sensitive emulsions.
Since the turn of the century, the aspect of time in photography has had a few eloquent spokesmen. From Lartigue’s snapshot reflexes and Atget’s sense of the accumulation of past, the century began to show promise. Later, the single images of Cartier-Bresson proved that a sphisiticated sense of time could be developed through the intuition. From published sequences like Brassa’s eight photographs, “Un hombe tombe dans la rue”, (Vu, 27 July, 1932) to Duane Michals’ narrative sequences of the 1970s, some photographers progressed from an eye which followed events to a mind that created them for the camera.

Serifos, 31 December 1975

We see the photographer’s elongated shadow on the beach just touching the front edge of a wave. There is no way to know if the wave is coming in or receding. The next frame of the sequence shows the wave washing in and the following three frames complete the wave’s wash until it has spent its momentum. The sequence ends.

That is how Krzyzanowski’s sequence reads. If we were to continue reading boustrophedonically, going back and forth, we could bring the wave back into the sea and then up the beach as many times as we wished. We could conceptually re-enact the motion of the sea itself, although in our excercise it would always be the same wave.
Cycles like those of waves and tides, the movement of the sun and moon across the sky, or the reappearance of the seasons forced man to notice time and made him feel the necessity to record, measure, and predict the cycles for his own comfort and survival.
The association of the tide cycle with the concept of time in the northern European seafaring regions was so close that many of their languages use the same root for the word tide and the word for time. But the tides could not provide a useful measure of time for anyone but sailors, and shorter cycles like the waves and the pulse were variable and difficult to keep track of. Parcels of time derived from the longer periods of natural cycles were also difficult to divide into standard units of equal length; the hours of daylight varied with the season, the earth’s rotation slowed each year and its orbit around the sun did not occur in an even number of days.
In 1665 Christiaan Huygens applied Galileo’s observation that the length of time for the lamp in the cathedral of Pisa to complete a full swing was always the same, the isochronism of the pendulum, to the making of a precision timepiece. The pendulum clock became, in its day, the most accurate mechanism for the measurement of time in equal and discrete units because it relied on a constant, the force of gravity.
What is interesting to us here is that Huygens’ conversion of a cycle into additive units of time helps to introduce the complement to cyclic time: linear time.

Biville, 6 September 1976

We see the photographer’s arm extending down so that his hand is flat against the beach sand. In the following four frames a wave washes over the sand from the left and retreats. In the next frame the wave cycle is finished, but the hand remains. In the last frame the hand is gone and only an impression survives. The sequence ends.
The viewer finds it difficult, because of the last two frames, to create the boustrophedonic cycle and flow back with the already departed wave. As the sequence is presented, time leaves the mode of the renewable cycle in the last frame. If the hand were to reappear and protect the impression against the next wave, we could expect the impression to survive again. But our senses argue for the understanding of the disappearance of the hand as a kind of death and the survival of the impression suspended in time as a kind of a fossil. This sequence in its tentative implication of eternity is a middle ground between the cyclic concept of time and the linear.
Although the sequence may seem to be only a trivial narrative, it can be used to symbolize the notion that biological time escapes the cyclic prison into the linear. In order to regain the endlessness of the cycle, the concept of eternity is introduced to cancel death. This is not unlike the concept of time in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
For the Hebrews, their covenant with God and its consequent mutual expectations directed their considerations of time either toward the past, which was a history of their origin and interaction with God, or toward the future, which is their eventual salvation as God’s selected people. To this the Christians added the concept of the unique event, Christ’s birth, death, anmd resurrection, and thus not only reiterated the idea of hope but augmented it with the idea of irreversible progress. But these are religious ideas that alleviate the one hard fact of biological time: death.

Carcans Plage, 18 September 1978

We see the photographer’s arm extending into the picture holding a short straight stick; the photographer’s shadow stretched out on the flat plane of the sand is also part of the image. The stick is released and falls toward the ground in the next four frames. Its direction and the direction of its accompanying shadow form the geometry of two lines radiating from the same point. In the last frame, the stick meets its shadow and the sand. It stops. The sequence ends.
This sequence introduces the concept of inevitability and finality. It is impossible, in our experience, to present the sequence without the stick meeting its shadow or being arrested by the sand without resorting to the supernatural. The flight of the stick or its shadow can not escape the reality of undirectional linear time nor does there seem to be an appropriate cyclic time that can return the stick to Krzyzanowski’s hand.

If we examine these three sequences, we see that the impression in the sand survives only because Krzyzanowski does not allow another wave to wash the area, as we know it must. So the concept of eternity is introduced through the elimination of what is inevitable.
Therefore, we have really only two conditions of time: the cyclic and the linear. From these two conditions, we are reminded of two analogous characteristics of light: Huygens thought it to be like waves and the followers of Newton thought it to be like discrete particles.
Of course, some form of light is necessary to all photography, but in Krzyzanowski’s work it is most often kept in the picture as a visual constant rather than as the subject itself, so that the statements about time are in greater relief. In the few cases where the light does change it changes with time. On the other hand, objects do move and change, in response to factors such as gravity, distance, or point of view that can be sensed better through the dimension of time.
In every case, whether time is the descriptive voice or no, Krzyzanowski asks the viewer to examine his own conventions of perception by creating a situation that is sometimes only effectively possible through a sequence.

Andros, 8 January 1977

A sequence of nine photographs show us two things simultaneously. The top half of each frame shows one piece of a 360 degrees panorama of a beach. In the lower half of each frame we see the photographer’s hand holding a stick which inscribes a circle in the sand as the photographer turns to photograph the panorama.
Here we have Krzyzanowski as the crude image of the god who created time in Plato’s imagination: ìHe resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to a number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we call timeî.
And here we have Krzyzanowski as the timekeeper, who stages his performances on the vast stage of space and time.
But these performances done before the camera are fundamentally different than all other performances, even those of the cinema. The amount of time for viewing the Krzyzanowski performance is not set by the performance itself as it is in music, dance, theater, or cinema, but by the viewer in much the same way as he sets his time for viewing painting and sculpture. It is not so much an experience during time that he presents, but rather a conceptual experience concerning time.
Finally, we are beginning to get a glimpse of the photographer’s other self: the performer.

Baja California, 24 February 1980

We do not perceive three frames in a sequence. We see a triptych. In the center is the photographer’s shadow silhouetting his outstretched thighs and the rest of his upper body, arms and head. The shadow of the rest of his legs appear in the adjacent frames as if they were continuous with the thighs. The shadow of each leg leads to a footprint in the sand. Above the footprint, but not touching the sand is the photographer’s foot as if it were suspended in mid air.
Obviously, this is not the work of a resurrected messiah. a natural philosopher, or a theologian, it is merely the photographer at play. In a more colorful description we can imagine him to be a magician, who plays tricks on our perceptions with his photographic sleights of hand in order to loosen the strict conventions of our imagination and in the end entertains us. But even in his play he uses the appearance of simultaneity to make the illusion work. Again he becomes amusingly serious and leads us back to our definition of photography as a medium for recording coincidence, for coincidence within time is simultaneity.
In addition to its ability to record coincidence, photography can present us with an image that is abstracted from our three dimensional experience and reduced by the laws of optics to a sheet of paper.
The reduction, which also applies to its representation of light, is not without a few miraculous properties, some of which have been practiced as ends in themselves. Although the complications of such clever technological processes are seductive to both the mechanical and philosophic mind, photography can be a real tool toward the clarification of our perceptions. The photographic abstractions that reduce the dimensions of the real world can help to reduce the clutter too. The conceptualization of photography in these terms is not a complication, but a simplification.
If we can imagine the single frames in his sequences as single thoughts about time, we can then apply St. Augustine’s beautiful statement about his conceptualization of time to Krzyzanowski’s photography.
“It is in thee my mind, that I measure time… The impressions, which things as they pass by cause in thee, remain even when they are gone; this is which, still present, I measure, not the things which pass by to make the impression. This I measure when I measure times. Either then this is time, or I do not measure times.”

David Travis
Curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Thursday, September 7, 1989

A critic for Le Figaro writing ten years ago about an exhibition of the photographer’s sequences in the Parisian gallery Zabriskie wrote: “Krzyzanowski et la vérité de la vérité”.
This pithy phrase gets to the heart of Krzyzanowski’s photography: an absolutely truthful reproduction of surrounding reality which would seem to be self-evident and yet is not at all; there is peculiar difference between reality as seen by the camera and by the human eye.
Only in photography’s more recent history has the truthfulness of the camera lens begun to interest photographers. Until the second half of the twenties, photography was first and foremost pictorial. Then, influenced by the Neue Sachlichkeit movement in Germany, it developed into an autonomous medium with its own aesthetic, that of the beauty of objectivity; this was at odds with earlier pictorial objectivity. The Neue Sachlichkeit photographers believed, rightly, that the camera should be used where it was pre-eminently suited, namely for a truthfully objective reproduction of reality. Yet however objectively the photographers of the Neue Sachlichkeit and their successors approached reality, they could not avoid the fact that their view of things was a personal interpretation (and therefore a subjective reproduction) of surrounding reality.
“To everyone his own reality”, wrote German photographer Herbert List.
List was well known in the Germany of the thirties and although he was, technically speaking, part of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement ( his house was furnished in the Bauhaus style), he chose in his photography to reproduce reality in a Surrealist way.
The representation of reality, this ideal of truth, also gained more of a foothold outside Germany and Europe. In the United States, there was a similar development in what can best be called straight photography: the type of photography where “the fundamental character of the picture is defined during the moment of exposure”.
Yet this surely applies to any photograph that is a direct reproduction of things as they are. Possibly the definition can best be illustrated by the mass of breathtaking, moving and shocking photographs which appeared before and after the War in such American magazines as LOOK and LIFE.
These photographs had to satisfy the terms of reference of a wide public; they were expected to show clearly what the subject was about. All photographs had one thing in common: they were taken at a decisive moment. These were peak years for photographic journalism. Photography seemed at its zenith when Robert Frank’s The Americans was published in 1959.
Established photographers gave it a hostile reception because the photographs in it did not conform to any valid terms of reference. Frank’s photographs seemed in the first instance to be in conflict with reality. This was not so much because Frank chose everyday subjects for his photography. It was more that the photographs seemed to have been robbed of their meaning, to lack any careful image composition or balanced structure and, when compared with the sophisticated photography of LOOK and LIFE which followed an established pattern, seemed to have been approached quite wrongly, Frank’s photography was considered subversive because it lacked any previously stipulated iconographic vocabulary which could have provided an explanation.
John Sarkowski in Mirrors and Windows placed Robert Frank at a start of a breakaway movement which was followed in the sixties by the work of Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Henry Wessel and others.
This development can best be defined as research into reality and as the depiction of that reality on a photographic surface and its analysis. All traditional ballast was being thrown overboard, and borders constantly being pushed back. The camera was being used as a crowbar to prise away established conventions of viewing.
This long introduction to the early sequences of MSK (taken since 1971) is intended to serve as a background against which his work can be put into context. It would probably be unsatisfactory to compare his sequences with the photography of Eadweard Muybridge or Duane Michals, since only the outer form of his sequential technique links him to them and not the intention behind his photography. Just as unsatisfactory is the viewpoint which links the sequence-phenomenon with developments in art from the late sixties onwards. Those developments were part of a general distancing from traditional patterns in social communication.
Divisions between the separate disciplines in art were no longer accepted.
The camera was being used by artists as a means to an end, in order to realize creative concepts. In his Photographie als Medium (Photography as Medium) Rolf Krauss says that with the entry of the camera into art (as bearer of ideas), a distinction was created between the photographic image and a work of art which had come into being with the help of photography. Here was a dichotomy between conventional photography on the one hand and conceptual photography on the other. “In conventional photography”, Krauss stated, “the image is an end in itself” (hat ihren Sinn in sich). Krauss went on to say that this dichotomy also seemed to imply that conceptual photography could expect a higher place in art than was awarded to “ordinary” photography.
MSK seems to take little notice of this dichotomy. His earliest sequences from 1971 (little-known until now) are simple yet outstanding sorties which are firmly rooted in photography.
They illustrated that MSK is a thoroughbred photographer who has set a viewing process in motion whereby viewing conventions are again broken. It is clear when viewing these early sequences that the camera’s performance is not subordinate to any preconceived idea.
They are the result of continual research with the camera into surrounding reality. At this stage there is no question of interfering with reality as is the case in later sequences.
One of the early sequences is Being let out of school (September 1971).
This is a series of six photographs of which the first is an empty playground with the school building in the background. The following photographs, taken from the same vantage point, quickly fill up as the children swarm outside. Looking at these images is a remarkable experience because spatial concepts such as “in front of” and “behind”, “above” and “below”, “close” and “far” are reduced to the limited flat surface of a photographic print.
More and more children come running towards the camera from the back of the image and jostle down to the front of the photograph. The closer they come, the less there is to see of them, only their heads in the last photograph. MSK’s sequences are sometimes literally abrupt observations in time, but not only that. (David Travis, who once called MSK “The timekeeper”, has described this wonderfully). His work gives equal importance to the conflict between our three-dimensional way of seeing and the two-dimensional registration of the camera.
There is a synthesis in MSK’s photography between the power of simplicity and the way the seeing process is disentangled.
A fine example of this is a sequence from early 1973 showing a water-tower near Plovan, Brittany. MSK photographs all sides of the water-tower from his position at its base, aiming the camera straight ahead so that only the bottom of the tower is visible within the frame. When you look at the series, you at once share in the viewing process. You immediately feel the need to abandon the conflict between the flat, segmentary presentation of the camera and the orderly coherent way we view things. The viewer’s unease only dissolves once he realizes that MSK walked around the foot of the tower, and then a sense of reality returns.
This and other early sequences are the introduction to the later works where the accent is transferred from existing subjects to those stage-managed for the camera. In these latter sequences, the camera is no longer a means to an end but it does play a more prominent role than before. The stagings do not seem to have come about according to any prescribed scenario; rather they seem to have arisen concurrently with the vantage point of the camera. This places the viewer in a remarkable situation, trying to grasp what is going on in the sequences not from the images in the sequences themselves but from absorbing the camera’s vantage point.
MSK uses his camera to hold a mirror up to the viewer; the viewer is confronted with his own concept of reality. Yet this mirror discloses and reveals to become itself a window on reality.
It will be clear to the reader that the sequences are not intended either solely or in combination to communicate a surrounding reality.
They are intended rather to sharpen critical powers of seeing and to expose traditional sensory observations. At first sight MSK’s social documentary reportages and photographic projects would seem aeons away from the sequences. It is as if a virtually unbridgeable gulf had to be crossed from austerity and isolation to the reality of Henny’s difficult existence or the immovable self-confidence of “de mooiste mensen van Nederland” (the most beautiful people in The Netherlands). Has an artistic vocation been exchanged here for being a photographer?
MSK is searching for a way to depict the visible world. The form he chooses, the way in which he approaches his subject, leads to confrontation and a new viewing experience.
There is nothing new about dropping a stone. What is new is the austereness and isolation which arranges and clarifies how a stone should drop before a lens whereby gravity becomes more important than sunlight and the stone darkens as it falls. This confrontation with the surrounding world and its arrangement is not shaken off by MSK when he returns from his isolation. The reportages and projects in which he places people in society in front of his lens again break patterns. MSK’s unusual way of presenting what is known to us leads us to another view of reality.
“The most beautiful people in The Netherlands” shows that our idea of beauty does not have to agree with the ideal held up by the media. Why not then swap a museum gallery with a popular weekly magazine for this end? However far removed MSK’s subjects may be from each other, they are part of the same vision of the world “in the sense that the human being -the artist- observes the world around and within himself, in order to gain insight and clarity, gains which can help him to penetrate the point of this world and of his life”.

Adriaan Elligens
Art-historian
August 1989