HASSAN ABDELGHANI

“In Laodamia, during nice afternoons, the living residents visit the dead and discover their own names on the stones: similar to the town of the alive ones, this dead city also communicates the story of the efforts, wrath, illusions, emotions, except that here everything is necessity, freed of randomness, partitioned, disciplined. In order to feel safe, the living Laodamia feel the need to seek in Laodamia of the dead explanations about itself, even at the risk of finding more or less of what was searched for: an explanation of more than one Laodamia, about the different cities that could have existed but did not, or just partial, contradictory and insufficient explanations”.

Italo Calvino, “Invisible Cities”

“From a distance” the photographer’s eye yearned to come close to the cities and meet its people. However, he approached the city of the living visiting that of the dead. Long gone faces of Pula intertwined in their resembling destinies and deaths, have sprung to life in the universal afterlife through palimpsests and ceramic oval portraits which the photographer intended to capture anew. What did the photographic distance allow him to recognize in these portraits of portraits? He discerned the category of duplicity, the ability to circumscribe life through death. He perceived a living city in a city of the dead, and inversely a dead city pulsating in a city of the living. He became aware of Calvino’s, and his own Laodamia which in Laodamia of the dead seeks an explanation of herself, even with the danger of revealing more than originally sought – an explanation on more than one Laodamia. These captured photographs, and portrayed portraits have made him determined in stopping the after moment once more.
Life after life. To perpetuate a death that lives. An oxymoron: a living death.
Even though he knew this distance offered him luxury and safety – a cold protective aura that will take him on a walk as an accidental traveller, unchanged by the vistas of the city – with each hungering look he crossed that protective cold barrier with a simple click of the camera, and established chapters of intimacy and recognition.
So, in the gaze of a femme fatale with lush red lips, and a cracked gaze on the ceramic oval he recognized his neighbour whose flirty eye had fallen victim to her husband’s raging fist one winter – the husband ended the passionate affair with the flamboyant officer, who with his wick-like moustache, and military grandeur lies only a few mounds away.
In a mildly surprised look of a boy, who has from a portrait been fretting for a century will the war soon end just like his lung ailment for which he was moved from the heart of the Monarchy to the Adriatic, the author recognised his best friend from his childhood days – he too never returned to school after the summer holidays. In a three-year old girl in a festive white dress, placed on the catafalque with eyes wide open (added afterwards in the studio of the town’s best photographer) he recognised his grandmother’s late sister who was never photographed during her short-lived life – the photograph was all that reminded the family, and maintained the connection with this small and sad life which hardly anyone remembers.
One by one, the author recognised faces and deciphered the codes of life and death that have pulled him in the secret labyrinth of his and Calvino’s Laodamia.
From a distance from which his eye, heart, and mind longed to revoke it, the yearning of the photographer managed, for a split second, to decode the redundancy of life’s fugue.
At the end of his journey the author is met not by an oval. Instead he is welcomed by a mirror. However, in his reflection he also sees a photographic camera – resembling the one that a Austro-Hungarian soldier, buried next to the girl in a white dress, dragged along, and who, through a twist of fate, started his after life not as a bohemian in the trendy world of Paris, but as the only surviving self-portrait, snatched from the un-crannied celluloid tape covered in dirt from the trenches of Galicia.