Aaron D. Levy, Small Receptacles -

small receptacles - Aaron D. Levy

	1. The caption is often the under-reported event in looking through the photograph. The idea of fusing event and image, wind and air within the window frame itself suggests, to me, something more fluid. I see the photograph as a door, and the caption its handle - together, they give back to us some comforting sense of solidity; but they actually allow things, wind, trees, people and, of particular interest to me, the imagination, to pass through.

	2. The photograph's caption being the "that" which, by default, we see through; the interplay between where one has looked in the past, and what one would want to be looking towards; I would ask that everything remain the same in our notion of the caption, with a little difference.

	3. For all these notions pile up, making inane the possibility of conceptualizing such a pliable medium - so pliable, in fact, as to often allow ourselves to forget "it". I wanted to further address the medium by embodying it in an incomplete language.

	4. Why have I returned to the photograph? Am I hoping to satisfy lack, the nearly kitsch-like loneliness of the photograph? Or is kitsch held in place by the assumption that the photograph could and always shall be lonely?

	5. Could we ever conceptualize a way to read the photograph that survives a Holocaust outside elegy and self-encircling epitaph? Am I, in effect, "cataloguing" their losses (those in the image, those who might have died) through mine own? And would the caption that drifts, or my captions being wanderings - be yet another variation on the media's persistent inability to caption photographs from the Holocaust accurately and ethically?

	6. I've always been drawn to the biblical prohibitions against individual sight; for instance, the idea of Lot's wife being turned to salt for looking back at the city on fire, as well as the possibility of conceptualizing smoke, or what remains after a city has burned. There must be, somehow, a way for us to figure catastrophe, and to caption it, in a manner that destroys neither us, nor that which we desire to see; and these captioned photographs, these windows, however unarrived, embody this unfulfilling.

	7. The city on fire embodies something dark in content, all the while radiating light and unbearable heat. Ash and smoke, on the other hand, function as captions to loss; what the captions say, whether they say anything - are so debatable as to exhaust sense.

	8. The medieval idea of holding light in one's hands, at the very least gesturing toward it, is something I wanted to literally reflect upon through the notion of the caption as window. Underneath it all, in it, might the window also embody something unmelancholic, less the idea of fragmentation and death than, oddly enough, fulfillment and joy.

	9. The self and the world enter into one another on a conceptual level much as one looks through a window and feels oneself rendered vulnerable to the surroundings. Surely, we cannot isolate the photograph and the caption; and yet, it is just as inane to throw the two into utter fusion.

	10. I referred to the idea of the window as door - as though the windore were the pivot point, the photograph and its caption the fulcrum for conceptualizing our sense of place in a world that runs by us all too fast, that always seems to be eluding our grasp, that persistently doubles back like memory (even here, memory is so alive we must mistake it for death). In our perverse way of figuring a place for ourselves, we want to think it needs us back.

Click on the images to enter the project.

Copyright © 2000, Aaron D. Levy, all rights reserved.
Photographs in this project courtesy of U.S. Holocaust Museum Archives, Washington, DC.

Levy, Aaron. Windore. Handwritten Press: Philadelphia, 2000.
This essay is adapted from the introductory interview to the artist's book. For the complete, downloadable e-text version, see handwritten.org.