Dissolving: “...cor meum vigilat”

Surely we see here another example of that hidden life of images, which impressed Aby Warburg so much, that he presented it as a separate phenomenon, called Pathosformel, in his 1905 study about Dürer’s relationship to classical antiquity. It is a more or less unconscious and timeless survival of expressive pictorial formulas, which here takes shape in the form of the rays emanating from the heart of the security guard.



The two doors are separated by only a few meters in the old town of Palma. The first one is in carrer del Call, opposite the “Las Olas” restaurant. The other at the corner of carrer de Sant Alonso and Santa Clara.

Carrer de Pont i Vich

The Sacred Heart of Jesus plaques, with the uppercase “BENDECIRÉ” (“I will bless”) label * were once present on almost all the doors of the city. Today only a few survive on the inner doors that open directly to the apartments. On the street front, only a few decaying ones have been left. Their place is occupied by the new type of image, whose presence is bound to a monthly fee.


Claudio Monteverdi: Sacred Music. Roberto Gini, Lavinia Bertotti & Ensemble Concerto. “Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat” (I’m sleeping, but my heart is watching)

Disolución: «...cor meum vigilat»

Seguramente se trata de otro caso de aquella pervivencia fantasmal de imágenes que fascinaba a Aby Warburg y que denominó por primera vez Pathosformel en un artículo de 1905 dedicado a Alberto Durero y la Antigüedad clásica: la insurgencia semiconsciente (o incluso inconsciente), ucrónica, de representaciones o fórmulas expresivas que nos salta ahora a los ojos en el resplandor del corazón del guardia.



Las puertas están separadas por muy pocos metros en las calles de Palma. La primera en el carrer del Call, en la parte trasera del bistrot «Las Olas». La segunda en el carrer de Sant Alonso, esquina con Santa Clara.

Carrer de Pont i Vich

Los Sagrados Corazones con el «Bendeciré» * en mayúsculas estaban en casi todos los portales de la ciudad. Ahora solo quedan en algunas puertas interiores, las que dan acceso directamente a las viviendas. En la calle apenas pervive alguno deteriorado. Los sustituyen estas otras imágenes cuya presencia exige el pago de una cuota mensual. Pero no es esa sustitución lo que nos ha llamado la atención sino la pervivencia residual, fantasmagórica, solo como fulgor, del corazón vigilante.


Claudio Monteverdi: Sacred Music. Roberto Gini, Lavinia Bertotti & Ensemble Concerto. «Ego dormio et cor meum vigilat.»

Dissolving: Fibonacci

This photo of the 8 April session of the Ukrainian parlament with an analysis of its proportions might suggest three things to the viewer.

To an extraterrestrial, that the earthlings perform all their actions, even the most spontaneous and passionate, according to complicated ritual rules, like a great dance.

To an earthling, that the law of the golden ratio defines everything.

To a cynical earthling, that with a bit of effort, the pattern of the golden ratio can be read into anything.

A photographer knows, that until he begins to photograph parliaments, thousands of pictures with the golden ratio are seen, praised, and made by he himself, so he shoots similar ones by habit, then he chooses, from among the dozens of shots, those that are the closest to it for publication, and if necessary, he even trims it (as here, where by cropping the right hands, he sacrifices a perfect pyramidal composition for the sake of a perfect golden ratio).

And an art historian knows that the golden ratio as an universal law must be analyzed only in such pictures where it can be shown.

Obverse and reverse

The previous part…

• My first thought was: Wow, in singlet at the dinner table? Well, they have sunken this far…

• Sunken? On the contrary, the faces and the whole company are much warmer, more human, more relaxed. On the other picture, how much constraint and anxiety! And how much progress in women’s equality: their glasses are the same size as those of the men! :)

• Ah, when photography still had its honor :) Although hell knows whether it was good when everyone had cramp from the photo machine… It is a solemn time machine, either they thought about this or not, but its purpose was to send a message into the future, to other generations. A care-taking of the family tree, so that that tree would stand for centuries. I chewed the ear of the family for a year to go ALL of us to the photographer. And lo, grandma was missing from it, because “it would have been complicated to resolve it five minutes before closing time”. Well, I say that family photo has no honor any more… These “come, buddy, take a photo of me stuffing my face with sausage or beer”, these snapshots speak about the moment to me. They are made not so much for the future viewers of it, but for the characters in it. Of course they will also become valuable, once they survive… But this is also another false construction, because Ansel also said that in a picture always there are two characters: the photographer and the viewer… No doubt, the second photo is much more intimate… we also rollick like this, in underwear, when we are together, the children doing their piggery, and we speaking with full mouth… and in the meantime we sometimes take pictures of each other, with mobile phones or else. The only question is whether we want to become perceived in the future like this, and whether we attribute to these pictures such a value that we would give them a chance of survival when we are no longer…

• The Singlet family apparently has a more relaxed relationship to the question of self-representation than the Soldier family, and I do not think they would discard this photo from the ones kept for the posterity. And if they leave it in the family album, they do it absolutely well, it has its place there.

• Yes, this is also an important question, whether we compare the right pictures with each other, two ones which were equally considered as family photos by the characters, or rather a family photo with a relaxed occasional shot, for an illustration of the erosion of culture. And in fact we should have looked for such photo about the second company, like the following one here below. Or an even more formal one, but this already illustrates the difference. And conversely, the private album of Tsar Nicholas II also has some foolish military school photos, which we now look quite bewildered at.

Po lowland, early 20th century, from here

„…all we are men…” Nicholas II. and friends

• Perhaps we should take into account the spontaneity made possible by the technological advances (more sensitive film, smaller camera, etc)
and the wider use made possible by its getting cheaper (even an amateur of small means can possess a camera)
and the different (broader spectrum) posturing due to the more everyday character of the situation of photographing.
Conversely: my great-grandparents with their children in 1929 – an eight-children worker’s family in Budapest, the father is a sailor and then a shipyard worker:

from here

• Are they really New Year’s Eve dinners both? Because the singlets suggest otherwise, and the little guy even is top naked. Or were the flats so well heated in the 1930s?
Grimpix is right, on the first one they sit cramped and stiff, just like my grandparents when being photographed. They brought the chairs out of the house, and, sitting in two rows, they sent a serious message to Cronus. They did not play, did not grimace, did not show any originality in front of the camera. The hierarchy of the world worked well, like on the photo of the chinovnik/lower middle class family’s photo: under God, the Tsar, and under him, we. An enviable order
And on the other picture, the modernity. It recalls me the phrase of Ortega y Gasset: “we live under the brutal rule of the masses”. You would desire a bit of aristocratism, exclusivity, but you see the happy dumbness of the kommunalka instead, although, judging from the furnishing, it is no co-tenancy…

• At New Year’s Eve they could heat up well in the dacha: wood is cheap, the iron stove cannot be regulated, so let us put on it as much as we can, it will burn out soon anyway.

• If only for the Kulechov Effect, we should say that the sequence of the images changes the feeling : in the second proposition, people on the oldest photo look really sad and depressed (as if they were attending a funeral meal) though on the first they just seemed serious and concerned, certainly praying. I am not sure the more recent picture changes so much.
There are certainly two worlds in these images even if the tea, the cakes and the alcohol are on both tables. More than the way people are dressed or undressed, more than the naked wall opposed to the full enhanced one, more than the darkness or the light, what strikes me is the new distance offered by the possession of one’s camera: you pass from an external and cold (maybe historical) observation to an empathic one, from the inside. What the most recent one lacks — that you can find in the oldest one, details, precision, strangeness too and strength and a fine sensation of quiet awaiting in a pending time — is balanced by the cheerful looks and the warmth of the faces. Not only distant in years but maybe also in places: Northern Russia against Southern?
Anyway, you could write good stories about both pictures.

The Kuleshov Effect

• I am invited into one of the pictures; in the other I am just a spectator. It has to do, I think, with the relationship of the photographer to the event in the photographs.

One picture, made with bright daylight streaming in from the upper left, is rigid and formal, and even has a certain air of unhappiness about it. It is possible that a photographer has been invited in on the occasion to make a family portrait. He arranges the subjects, clears the space from the nearest end of the table, in order to give the heavy tripod-mouted box camera a clear view of all the faces. “Hold still,” he says, so that the slow photograpic plate could capture the image with sharpness. The small child on the right seems to have shifted slightly during the exposure; his face is a bit blurred.

In the other, the photographer seems to be a guest at the party. He happens to have a camera. “I’m going to take a picture,” he says, and everybody looks toward him; some move around the table to get into the frame. He uses an amateur camera and only the available light, a ceiling lamp that makes the shadows under brows, noses, and chins look dark and heavy. Still, we take the photographer’s place when we look at the image. We are part of the proceedings, an invited guest -- not a clinical or professionally detached observer.

There is a historical progression in the images. The story in the first pairing is says, “That was then, this is now.” The second is more like, “Here we are, remember how we used to be?” Something could easily be read into the changes in social standing that (if we think in narrative terms) “took place” between the two images. The unhappy ones are wealthy, the less weathly here are a bit happier. Some might say material decline is an opportunity for moral advance; but we know it doesn’t always work out that way. Regardless, I know which party I’d rather attend!

• Anything else, anyone?

Two feasts

This post should be actually given the title “The power of images”, because this is what I want to talk about.

Or, what title would you give to a post that would publish just the two photos of these two different Russian New Year’s Eve dinners in a row, without a word?

Do you feel the world represented by one of the pictures better than the other? Would you prefer to live in one or the other? Do you see any kind of moral development/regress in the sequence of the two, and if so, what?

What logical relation do you project between the two pictures? A temporal one? It was like this, it became like this? If so, what kind of story do they describe? Or rather a parallel, a counterpoint? While those so, these so? If yes, which picture represents those and which one these?

And what do you think, if someone put up the two pictures in a post, what would he want to suggest with them?

And now look with absolutely fresh eyes at two completely different pictures about two very different feasts.



Put yourself the same questions.

Does the order of the pictures influence your answers? Do you identify more with the one you see first, or with the one following it as a counterpoint or punch line? Did the one which was more sympathetic earlier become now more alien to you?

The simple grammar, which is there, without exception, in the serving of every picture presented to your eyes, and which is so convincing not only because it is largely governed by subconscious conventions, but also because its actual generation is mainly your job, is especially useful to be made explicit in today’s times.

Pictures cut

“How large can the original picture be?” – asks Studiolum. And this question can mean much more in connection with the assassination of Sarajevo than one would think. Because pictures can be not only cut, but also cut together or cut apart, as well as provided with whatever caption you like.

Under the pretext of the above mentioned post I present two books on the attempt of Sarajevo where the pictures are not only cut, but also cut together, and the omissions are also absolutely characteristic.


The book of Ferdinand May, The “Black Hand”, published in the 1970s in the excellent Hungarian translation of the great poet Dezső Tandori, is a veritable working-class action novel, which also borrows elements and illustrations from the book at the right side, O. Treyvaud’s Tragedy in Sarajevo (1934). The structure of the two works are completely identical: they describe the recruitment of the assailant Princip and his companions, their way to Sarajevo, and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand from step to step. Ferdinand May also completes the story with combative German Social Democrats, Serbian military officers and Russian diplomats. Some side-stories taken from Brehm’s How it all began and Emil Ludwig’s The July of ’14 can be also recognized in the plot.

Already the cover is iconic

A shortage right at the beginning. Both books start in the “Golden Sturgeon” restaurant in Belgrade, but only the French book shows it to us in picture.

The Golden Sturgeon restaurant in Belgrade / A young Muslim woman

Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević recruits the future assailants in the Golden Sturgeon. The German book starts with him its illustrations which are identical to the French source.

Colonel Dragutin Dimitriević, or by other name Apis / This is where the conspirators crossed the border of Serbia and Bosnia

Colonel Dragutin Dimitriević

As you can see, the German book settles the border crossing with the bridge. The French one is more talkative.

The Friends of France hotel in Sabać. / Oh, these roads!

Crossing the stream on two robinia trunks.  / The traveler’s home

Hallo, Dušan! (The Isaković island in the background) / Twenty meters later on Austrian territory…

Milan Kula’s farm / Crossing the potok (stream)

This is also Európe – a Bosnian little town under Austrian rule / This is where the two men of the “Black Hand” passed the night

In Janja the muezzin announces the third prayer hour / Bosnian peasants in Janja

Sarajevo’s Muslim quarter recalls Asia, or more precisely the centuries of Ottoman oppression

A Bosnian village / Sarajevo, the Turkish quarter

Finally we come to a point where the German book includes an interesting picture which is missing from the other one. The arrival of Franz Ferdinand and his wife is an important picture, as in many book the picture following it features as the “last” photo on the heir to the throne. (Incidentally, in Vienna you can view all the relics of the fateful journey, including the bloody suit, too.)

The heir to the throne arrives at the railway station of Sarajevo. To the right, the hated Governor Potiorek

Certainly not the last photo on the heir to the throne

A contemporary photo of the bazaar of Sarajevo

The bazaar of Sarajevo and the grand mosque

Muslims on the market of Sarajevo / The Bridge of Goats in Sarajevo)

The town hall in Sarajevo / Entrance of the Franz Joseph street seen from the Latin bridge. Princip was standing at the right side of the building which now houses offices.

And we have come to one of the most important pictures.

Five minutes before the attempt: the Archduke and his wife start on their fateful way

Two minutes before the attempt: the Archduke and the duchess leave the town hall

The German book also includes another picture which has fallen out of the collective consciousness, although the Wiener Bilder published a cut version of it already on 5 July 1914.

The same picture from another point of view: behind the wheel, the driver Šojka

Moreover a third photo can be also found here, with an important detail: Count Harrach is already standing on the edge of the car, in order to protect the princely couple.

A few seconds before the attempt. We cannot see Count Harrach on the edge of the car / Princip’s revolver was fired on this corner

Four seconds before the attempt. The driver, Ljoka is just about to turn at the corner to drive along the Franz Joseph Street. The cross marks the place where Princip was standing.

Notice that in contrast to the caption there is a third person standing at the edge of the car. And it is also interesting why the apparently large photo was cut in the German book, which is closed with the familiar iconic photo (also published in the Wiener Bilder):

The best known photo: Princip dragged away by gendarmes and secret policemen

And finally the French book with a similarly well known icon and a less known photo:

Princip, after his arrest / Čabrinović in a photo studio