The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost
As we thumb through Yesterday’s Sun, and examine the profound images it contains, we
are pulled into it as if by invisible strings. The book asks that we forsake reading for
wandering, and follow Uri Gershuni as he embarks on a journey in the footsteps of the
British inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot. We are thus, in essence,
following a follower, a son walking in his father's footsteps.
We usually think of time as a linear continuum, as an archeological site where past,
present, and future are layered one atop another. Yet is this true of this particular
instance? Are we as viewers merely following in the footsteps of Gershuni, who is
following in those of Talbot? Or are we compelled to chart our own trail, and to
simultaneously rethink the trail that is our life? Are we journeymen or mere ramblers?
We imagine Talbot taking his first steps on virgin land, yet was this truly the case? Was he
not a follower himself? Is photography not, after all, the stepchild of painting? Isn't every
father always the son of another?
And what about the Holy Ghost?
If we were to think of Gershuni's work as a scripted trinity, then it is a script whose
characters are waiting to be cast. At a first glance, it appears that Talbot plays the father,
while the son is played by Gershuni himself. But could it be that the father in question is
actually Gershuni’s biological father, the celebrated Israeli painter Moshe Gershuni? Is Uri
Gershuni the son, or is it Bambi, the stranger who appears repeatedly throughout the
book? Who plays the role of the Holy Spirit? Might it be the ghost of Fox Talbot, rising up
from amongst the dead to wander through the vast spaces of Lacock Abbey? Or us
viewers, who are converted into believers? Then again, can this role truly be impersonated
by any one? How, after all, can one embody the role of the absent?
Gershuni sets off on a Sisyphean quest aimed at finding he who is absent. He goes on a
date, knowing full well that his partner (Fox Talbot) will not attend. He departed long ago,
and now only traces of him can be found. His country estate in Lacock, the objects he so
diligently collected, and of course, his photographs; poetic first attempts that grapple with a
new medium, depicting his personal surroundings, beloved family members, and
possessions.
Gershuni is well known for his portraits. Taking a photograph is, for him, like going on a
blind date. His eyes scrutinize the person facing him, waiting for his own gaze to be
reciprocated. His portraits, which mostly depict men, capture two people looking at each
other. But rather then seeing each other’s eyes, they become aware of their interlocking
gazes. Both photographer and subject acquire a double face – at once their own and that
of the other. As their eyes go out to each other, the body and beating heart follow. The
camera surveys the body positioned in front of it, registering the intimations of its inner
workings as they are etched on the surface. Then it meets the face, the subject's eyes, the
spark in his pupils. The photographer's reflected gaze hits the camera. Looking at the
camera amounts to acknowledging the existence of both the apparatus and the
photographer standing behind it. It means acknowledging the moment of photography.
In this case, however, Gershuni stands alone. No one looks back at him, there is no
presence to acknowledge his own. He seems to embrace this new position. He begins his
visit at the village graveyard, where Fox Talbot is buried, entering the domain of the dead
in search of a surrogate father, or perhaps a soul mate. Yet instead of another pair of
eyes, what he comes upon is an inscription, an epitaph: "In memory of William Henry Fox
Talbot...” All that remains is a memory, an image, the ghost of an image. From the domain
of the dead he moves on to the house of spirits, Talbot's house: Lacock Abbey. There he
stands before the famous latticed window, which is depicted in what is considered to be
the first photographic negative. The spot where he places his camera is likely the very
same spot where Talbot positioned the tripod with his "mouse trap" camera. Gershuni rephotographs the iconic window, creating a new icon that is similar, yet not identical, to the
original. The second image joins the first, becoming part of a charged genealogy. The
father's will commands the son to stand alone, to look outside from within, to search for a
glimpse of sunshine capable of penetrating the dark, gloomy room.
Is Gershuni destined to dwell in Plato's cave? Is he bound to the realm of the shadows?
For a photographer, light is a life force, an artery gushing with blood. Shadows, on the
other hand, are associated with the ephemeral, with disappearance and death. Gershuni
entertains a dialectical relationship with light and shadow: On the one hand, he yearns for
“the sun of yesterday,” refusing to let go of the past. He grasps onto the history of
photography as well as onto his own history, repressing the knowledge that the sun always
sets, and that fathers are destined to die. But he also believes that fathers never truly die;
they continue to live in the realm of shadows as ghosts, memories, images. Shadows thus
become the hiding place of a lonely child; a site where the imagination flourishes, and
where sunshine is a sweet dream.
In Plato’s The Phaedo, his teacher Socrates states prior to his death: “I am confident that
there truly is such a thing as living again, and that the living spring from the dead. " At a
time when photography is being eulogized, Gershuni travels to its birthplace to bring it
back to life. The act of re-photographing is, in this case, an act of resuscitation. Gershuni's
photographic intervention may be likened to the raising of the Eucharist. He seems to be
saying: "The shadows are my body and light is my blood."
Shadows and light, body and soul, are interwoven like the silk thread of a spider's web.
The immortal soul aspires to be free, while the body holds it captive. The soul vacillates
between freedom and captivity as it circles around the hollow core of necessity. Like Oscar
Wilde, who found spiritual growth and freedom through the physical and emotional
hardships of his incarceration in Reading Prison, Gershuni aims to find freedom for himself
in a dark cell. In De - Profundis, the famous letter he wrote his lover from prison, Wilde
states: “Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the
accidental existence, it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored
in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more that it is a
silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and narcissus to
narcissus. Truth in art is a unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of
the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is
no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only
truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and
cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a
star there is pain.”
Gershuni's cell is crawling with shadows – the shadows cast by his mythical biological
father, as well as those cast by other spiritual fathers. He embraces the shadows, the
realm into which pain is projected. He recognizes the truth in pain – which, unlike
pleasure, wears no mask.
Gabriel Dove