Two photographs by Robert Doisneau
Today’s poems are based on two photographs by the French photographer Robert Doisneau, Le Cracheur des Flammes, literally “the spitter of flames” — or, in more colloquial English, “the fire-breather” — and La Bièvre, Gentilly, “the Bièvre river at Gentilly”. I had the privilege of seeing these images in the Tokyo Museum of Photography during my recent trip to Japan.
The image at the beginning of this post is La Cracheur des Flammes; regrettably I was unable to track down an image of La Bièvre, Gentilly on the internet (and museums in Japan are quite strict — they generally don’t allow you to take photographs of the pictures hanging in the gallery). La Bièvre depicts a narrow street or alleyway with a river flowing down the centre from the bottom of the frame narrowing into the horizon. The photograph is, like La Cracheur des Flammes — and most of Doisneau’s oeuvre — also in black and white. The river or stream — the Bièvre of the title — is quite still, its surface perfectly reflective; in the photograph, the stillness and flatness of the river almost makes it seem as if Doisneau has taken an eraser to the vertical, clearing a blank space in the photograph. Faint on the horizon, slightly to the left of the square image, is the angular silhouette of a church steeple. The steeple is the only remarkable feature on the horizon, which is largely composed of a region of (what appears to be) blank, overcast sky.
Although I didn’t realise it at the time, it occurs to me now that La Bièvre, Gentilly and La Cracheur des Flammes, although very different images when it comes to their subjects, do have something quite notable in common: both images are centred on a space of whiteness or blankness. In La Cracheur des Flammes this blankness is opened up by the flames of the titular “cracheur”; in La Bièvre, Gentilly the blankness is, again, the river which gives its name to the photograph. It is almost as if Doisneau is attempting, in these images, to make photographs of something which, because it cannot be “seen”, is, in a sense, the opposite of photography — the subject of these two photographs, on my reading, is emptiness; blankness itself.
LE CRACHEUR DES FLAMMES The man eating fire burns a blank page into the center of the photograph. The spectators gather round to watch him do it. Most of the people in the photograph are probably dead. The image depicts a time when dirt still existed, and all the people wore the same kind of clothes. The integrated circuit has not been invented yet.
LA BIEVRE, GENTILLY Why would I wait for the salvation proferred by the horizon church when I could bend down and drink from this river of moonlight which flows at my feet and contains all of the sky?