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Seizing On Accidental Beauty:
The Photographs of Robert Zverina |
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| This picture of Central Park, taken by
Robert Zverina, has
become my favorite image of New York. When I lived on West 86th Street, I
used to walk through the park to the East side, and the walk would remind
me that even in that gray and gritty city there were soft and beautiful places,
but when I moved to Brooklyn, I soon forgot about Central Park and its particular
magic. This photograph, like so many others of Robert's, brings back memories
directly associated with the picture itself, and finally retrieves a veritable
cascade of memories, touched off, I think, by the beauty of the image, a
beauty that manages to call to many other partly buried images of beauty
that I recognize as soon as they return, and which I realize I have missed
before they were brought back by the picture. |
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 This is only one of the
pictures of Robert Zverina's that I admire and have hung all over the walls
of my house. At first, I admired photographs which were formally beautiful
as well as affecting. Invariably, these pictures were surprising as well.
One photograph, titled "The Day That Just Kept Getting Better," is a picture
of a field with mountains in the background, and the field itself is filled
with bathtubs that look, in this picture, as if they themselves were some
kind of strange, grazing animals.
No one can walk around in New York without noticing the fire escapes that
cover the walls of the smaller apartment buildings, but I doubt that anyone
pays much attention to them. This picture, with its design made up by the
fire escapes, somehow finds beauty in these old and rusted and constantly
repainted metal exoskeletons. I cannot look at this picture without being
reminded of family stories which revolved around events taking place on these
fire escapes in a time before air conditioners, in a time when mothers went
to work and left their children locked
 in
the apartment, and the children came out onto the fire escape when their
mother's called, and threw down the key to their apartment, first having
wrapped it in a piece of paper. |
There is something in his photographs
that speaks of the amazing beauty which is accidental beauty, there for the
seizing by anyone who can see it, and anyone who is generous enough to record
it for others. There are photographs of objects reflected in puddles, in
the hoods of cars, objects which then become distorted and entirely new and
unfamiliar. Some of these images are stunningly beautiful. Others, like the
 photograph
of one person painting a wall while someone else looks on, somehow become
emblematic of much larger spheres of activity, as if, should you look at
them long enough, they come to stand for all human striving. These pictures
speak for themselves, of themselves, and of many things beyond themselves.
The woman's nude body, striped by bands of light so that she seems to become
part tiger, is such a photograph. Human nature slides into something deeper
and wilder here; it becomes, to me, a profound photograph.
 Robert's website, which
has been growing for two years, is now a world of its own. Every day, there
is a new picture and a new piece of prose. This site with its new picture
becomes so addicting that on days when for some reason there is no new photo,
I find myself terribly disappointed, as if I had been promised something
to which I was looking forward and found only an empty box. Here he has endless
photographs, each accompanied by a text. The cumulative effect of travelling
through this remarkable maze of a website is something between reading a
novel and seeing a film. Gradually, the lives of people who are young in
New York today begins to emerge, the life of the author of the site representing
his own life, as well as the life of a good number of his generation: the
way those young people live now, as someone or other once put it.
 The
website chronicles his love affairs, his travels to Prague, the illness of
his mother, his time spent with friends, the climbing of a mountain that
nearly killed him, trips across country by train. Here there are many pictures
that are truly accidental, little splinters of life--a friend's toes, an
odd shot of a dog's owner, glimpses of what was going on at the time. These
photos are entirely unlike the "formal" ones, like Central Park Blue, and
on their own they might have trouble justifying themselves. But in this
remarkable website, each of these splinters begins to move in the mind, as
if, out of the corner of your eye, you were seeing a jigsaw puzzle assembling
itself. "Here we are, and there we are," as Eeyore used to say.
I love these pictures, and it is a pleasure to have some of them here.
Contact Robert if
you have anything to say about them. He writes hilarious e-mails. |
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