SIGHT UNSEEN catalog - California Museum of Photography ...

42
annie hesse pAris
Annie Hesse is restless. She has lived in
California, Guatemala, Southern Spain,
Crete, Cairo, Africa, London, and Paris. A
camera has accompanied her since she was
a kid. “The world spins by awfully fast and
I obviously have a craving to soak it all up.
With my vision the way it is, I can’t absorb
it. So the camera does it for me.”
In a famous essay, Walter Benjamin
describes the flâneur as the characteristic
observer of the modern age. Hesse is the
quintessential flâneur, someone who walks
the streets in order to experience them.
To Benjamin, this perspective of constant
motion offers the only chance to decipher
the current contradictions of order and
chaos and resolve modern dislocations.
Hesse’s photography began with a degree
from the San Francisco Art Institute, slightly
better sight, and a fast-moving career as
a punk rock photographer/participant in
northern California and London from 1978
to 1982. Her early black and white work is
studded with punk luminaries: Iggy Pop,
Fast Floyd, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The
Clash, The Avengers, The Sirens, The Vktms,
The Dreamists, The Offs with Snuky Tate.
The images look like someone who can’t
see hauled a camera into a brawl, and that’s
pretty close to the truth.
By now, Hesse defines herself a citizen of
the world. She once hopped a Yugoslavian
freighter from New Orleans to Casa Blanca
with an unsteady boyfriend (their messy
break-up occurred mid-Atlantic). She spent
a year hitchhiking throughout Africa and
lived on Crete for seven years. Except for a
short stint in Bellevue, Washington working
for Microsoft, she has been based in Paris
since 1985.
Describing the vision of the
“legally blind” is a treacherously
hazy business.
Hesse says she sees “rough
impressions, like Matisse at
his vaguest” and only with
her right eye. With only
impression to go on, she
makes photographs based
on hunch, conjecture, and
curiosity. And she does so in
the tumult of near ceaseless
travel. “In the chaos of a
foreign place, I might be
attracted to something about
the color, or the sound, or
vague forms. I’ll be right in
front of it and not know what it is. So I’ll
capture it. Later, I use the picture to figure
out what it was that I saw.”
Photographically enabled vision is a
condition of the modern world—the frozen
drop of milk, the fetus glowing in the womb,
the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. But
Hesse has built her entire visual world
piece by piece from her own photographs.
Her memory is the camera’s memory. “For
someone who’s been visually impaired all
my life, I’m extremely visually oriented.
Photography has created my world. It stops
time, and I absorb it later.”
India, 2002