Pietas

Saratoga poet Marilyn McCabe has sent, via a friend, her poem inspired by Balazs Gardi's 2007 image of a man holding a wounded boy in the Korengal Valley in East Afghanistan. Nearly everyone who commented on this image compared it to some masterpiece of painting or sculpture, by Michelangelo, by Caravaggio, by Rembrandt, by El Greco, or just generally from the grand tradition of western art. Photojournalists and documentary photographers have long winced at the suggestion their work "looks like a painting," because the essence of documentary photography is that it decidedly is not a painting, meaning it is not manufactured, arranged, distilled, or otherwise interpreted to create or enhance dramatic effect. Traditionally, the first authority of a documentary photograph is precisely its literal truth, the spontaneous representation of reality it certifies and thereby honors.

El Greco, Pieta, 1587-97

More than once, I was asked if Balazs had "set up" his image; if, like a film director or one of the cadre of postmodern artists who create photographs from fictional tableaux, he had somehow staged the scene to heighten its impact. Though I have never spoken to Balazs about this, I am certain the answer is an unequivocal no. The verity of Balazs's work is its most obvious strength and virtue. (One does not endure, as Balazs Gardi does, the difficulty and sometime danger of documentary photography to create false images and present them as real.) Balazs does not call his photograph Pieta. He did not set out to create a pieta. Yet life, in its horror and beauty, offered him one and he accepted. And thus did he join a long tradition of images of suffering and pity.

Eos Lifting the Body of Her Son Memnon, Attic red-figure cup, 490-480 BCE

And yet, if a documentary photographer does not create like the masters of old, this does not mean his eye and soul are not moved to similar depths of recognition and compassion. This, I think, is a more agreeable and profound sense in which a great photograph can resemble a painting -- or symphony or any other sublime human creation. In her poem, Marilyn captures this affinity with eloquence, and mirrors it by concluding with a quotation from a master of her own medium, W. H. Auden, writing on Brueghel. The result is a richly-faceted meditation on how art reflects and magnifies our common humanity.

Afghan Pieta  
  Eyes of the one holding the limp body,
  the grainy surface as of stone,
  or pigment made of rough powder.
 
  The triolet: help sought
  from the less of it, bonds

  broken, things cut down.

  There’s a body.

  There’s a body

  and there’s life

  left, it’s seeping,

  wounds we must look for

  in tell-tale places.

  There’s the cradle:

  the holder’s arms,

  chest to body.

  The ache the eyes

  are always turned toward:

  the third figure obscure.

  The matter is always

  man. The suffering

  old masters always knew.

                                             --Marilyn McCabe

Balazs Gardi, Afghan man and wounded boy, 

Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, East Afghanistan,  2007