SIGHT UNSEEN catalog - California Museum of Photography ...

Blind Man’s Bluff
12
evgen bavcar pAris
Evgen Bavcar was born in a small Slovenian
town near Trieste in 1946. Childhood
accidents claimed both eyes before he was
twelve. He completed bachelor degrees in
philosophy and history from the University
of Ljubljana. He began making photographs
as a student. At 26, Bavcar moved to Paris,
intensified his photography, and completed
a masters and doctorate in the philosophy of
aesthetics at the Sorbonne. By 1988, he was
named official photographer of the City of
Light’s Photography Month. He continues
to live in Paris and has had more than one
hundred exhibitions across Europe, but is
little known in the United States.
Bavcar has written eloquently for decades
on his experience with blindness and
photography. It is appropriate to let him
speak for himself. The following quotations
are drawn from
various writings
and interviews.
“I was a terrible
child, who the
teachers could
hardly teach. I
especially liked
technology and
reading. One
day a branch
damaged my left eye, and I was unable to
predict the great calamity that had been
forewarned. For months, I observed the
world with just one eye, until one day a
mine detonator damaged my right eye as
well. I didn’t become blind immediately but
little by little, it went on for months, as if it
were a long farewell to light. So all the time
I had to quickly capture the most beautiful
things, images of books, colors and celestial
phenomena, and to take them with me on a
voyage of no return.”
“The pleasure I felt [when I took my first
photograph] resulted from my having stolen
and captured on film something that did not
belong to me. It was the secret discovery of
being able to possess something I could not
look at.”
“What I mean by the desire for images is
that when we imagine things, we exist. I
can’t belong to this world if I can’t imagine
it in my own way. When a blind person says
‘I imagine’, it means he too has an inner
representation of external realities.”
“My task is the reunion of the visible and
the invisible worlds.”
“I have a private gallery, but, unfortunately,
I am the only one who can visit it. Others
can enter it by means of my photographs.
But they aren’t the originals any more. Just
reproductions.”
“The smooth surface of the images taken by
the camera do not look at me, I only have the
physical proof of landscapes and people that
I have seen or met. That is to say, my gaze
exists only through the simulacrum of the
photo that has been seen by someone else.”
“I feel very close to those who don’t
consider photography as a ‘slice’ of reality,
but rather as a conceptual structure, a
synthetic form of pictorial language, even
a Suprematist image like Malevich’s black
square. The direction I have taken is closer
to a photographer like Man Ray, than to
forms like reportage, which is like shooting
an arrow towards a fixed moment.”
“[In my photographs] people appear
very different before the lens and before
themselves. They are different when faced
with an unknown or infinite darkness.
The absence of the photographer’s eye is
accentuated by the precarious irreversible
moment of taking a photo; that photo which
by coming from a hidden gaze is transformed
into a kind of double death.”
“Blindness isn’t just the blind person’s
problem— it’s also the sighted person’s,
if not more so.”
“Traditional photographers are the ones
who are really a little bit blind from being
constantly bombarded with images. I
sometimes ask them what they see, but it’s
hard for them to tell me. It’s very difficult
for them to find genuine images, beyond
clichés. It’s the world that’s blind: there
are too many images, a kind of pollution.
Nobody can see anything. You have to cut
through them to discover true images.”
“My images are fragile; I’ve never seen
them, but I know they exist, and some of
them have touched me deeply.”