* In his book of essays “Memory for Forgetfulness”, Robert Louis Stevenson, who also wrote “The Treasure Island” and other memorable books, devotes a whole chapter ”to the joy of unpleasant sites”. Regarding a six-week vacation he spent in a non specified location he wrote: “The landscape I mean was a level plateau without trees, where winds cut the air whip-like. During miles and miles nothing changed. Notwithstanding, a river did end in the sea near the village where I lieved, but the river valley was not too deep and desert, at least up to where I was willing to go up. There were roads, of course, but roads lacking beauty or interest, due to the fact that since there were no trees, and the terrain was only slightly irregular, one could see the whole road exposed in front of you, from the beginning. Nothing was left to imagination, nothing to expect, nothing to see in the roadsite ditch...” (1)
The writer continues with a long evaluation of thoughts about the landscape he sees, at a location he does not want to define and that may be part of his birthplace Scotland. While Stevenson strives to find elements to allow him to “enjoy” that place qualified as “unpleasant” at his first sight,
Carlos Bittar Perinett also faces a landscape (or a world?) that can only be tagged as unpleasant. Or, more properly, two.
I believe I am not following the order of the way the book exposes the most representative of three photographic essays that cover a long creation period, neither are all present since the selection was done keeping in mind a unity within the intention that every book is suposed to have. When I say two landscapes or two worlds, they are Tablada and Ciudad del Este. The former in Asunción, a hidden place far away from most people due to its special location. It is a district full of industrial refrigerators crossed by the “Mburicao” creek which, after sorting out residential areas where high class people live, splashes into a marginal world until its end in the Asunción Bay.
Such as people from the “Chacarita”, people live crowded in precariously built houses, where the vital space has reduced its limits to much less than those considered as minimum. I ignore the rationale by which that sordid poverty stripe is still divided into various districts with different names. The families who live there, though it is more precise to speak about “human nuclei” such as all the others, base their making of living on the garbage dragged by the creek, in a similar fashion to those of the “gancheros” (people who dwell into the garbage to clasify it towards recicling and later sale) from the Cateura garbage dumping place.
In a conversation with Bittar Perinetti he told me: "I feel good in these places if I am with my camera”. He meant both Tablada and Ciudad del Este. Actually, he does not enjoy the landscape per se, such as Stevenson would have, but because he is surrounded by a chaotic world made of disintegrated elements which have not reproduced like those biological tissues which obey a singular design and geometry, but rather have been made by a spontaneous, anarchic and laberynthian process. The photographer’s mission will be to discover where are the essential elements conforming that ladscape, the governing forces, to put the necessary order wihout taking away from the spectator the tangled-looking world from where it stems.
Before going on, it is necessary to attempt a definition of the sense in which the word “landscape” is used here. It is not the one traditionally understood as: “...land extension seen from a place...” or “land extension considered by its artistic aspect” (2), but in a wider sense in which “land extension” could also be a part of a city, of a house, of a town, etc. Thus we speak of “rural landscape” or “country landscape”, of “urban landscape”, and I cannot find a term to describe that marginal landscape created in the middle of the limits where the wealthy city and the misery village join, the landscape of abundance and the landscape of utter scarcity.
All these elements are found in the photos of Bittar Perinetti, almost always explicit, some other times hidden. This is done either through the water reflections, the feet of a fisherman sinking in the sand, the fishing pole reflected as if in a mirror on the river surface. It is also hidden in the esthetic language developed by the photographer. However, his images never stop being direct, nor altered by mechanical tricks, or “embellished” by appealing to subterfuges of which I keep a position of unpremeditated suspicion. On the other side of the coin, there is the moment in which the garbage collector truck dumps its load and the garbage, like a very special rain, stays suspended in the mid air, without gravity, with its own volume, were we can recognize the rest of many products daily consumed in our homes.
Following Stevenson’s appreciations on the subject, he notes: “But the landscape does not affect the ideas more that what the ideas affect the landscape. We see the places throught the humor as if it were through glasses of various colors. We are an end of the equation, a note of the chord, and we settle the dissonance or harmony almost at will. The result should not worry us if we are capable of letting ourselves go enough into the surrounding landscape that follows us, by having adequate ideas or scheming an appropriate story as we step on” (3).
Here a sort of paradox is involved since the photographer introduces a certain harmony within the scene he chooses to let us watch; a location of elements that make our sight move from place to place on that surface, with a sweeping view of the image. But there is also a touch of dissonance by capturing and transmitting that world he considered, in a paragraph above, a chaotic, anarchic and labyrinthine world. When Bittar Perinetti mentions he feels at ease in such places as long as he is carrying his camera, he is nothing but holding in his hands the tool that will allow him (and us, as participating spectators) the landscape of “humor seen through glasses of various colors”. It is also the tool that protects him, that defends him of being devoured by that reality. However it allows him to give himself up enough “bearing adequate ideas or weaving an appropriate type of story as we get through”. After all, that story does not necessarily have to be literary.
The same occurs with the photographs of “Ciudad del Este”, a city with which he has a very particular and contradictory bond. He told me he remembered the city from many years ago, when he used to pay a visit to his father who lived there. It was another city altogether, with its Casino-Hotel that symbolized certain values and a place in the social scale. The aspect of the city reflected the motto: “Ciudad del Este: The garden city”, with its green and wooded roads and its wide avenues and parks. All this is gone due to an unspeakable of greediness before a sick eagerness of profit and the maneuvering of a non-limit power that allowed parks and squares disappear to make space for hundred thousands of small stores without having to approach the authorities of the City.
Face to face with those memories of his childhood, the vacation days spent with his father and the present city, he takes a sort of revenge when he registers its decadence, the way in which it was destroyed as programmed, where order, cleanliness, and what is now called environment disappeared because no one has enough time left to do anything else than earning money. The profusion of advertising signs, electric cables spread in clusters, joined into a thread of knots to which pieces of fabric full of lint remaining from the now unusable passacaglia destroyed through time by rain, wind and the sun. They know when to put them but nobody remembers when to remove them.
The gigantic sign of “La Belle, Parfumes”, showing piecewise behind the electric wires and other visual interferences is grotesque. Could there be such a “belle” (beautiful) in the midst of such mixing of blurred elements? And the word “parfumes” (perfumes) in French such a temptation of glamour from Paris arises as an irony.
Before the Ciudad del Este views there are some from Asunción where the city is seen from its outskirts: The van that once was a burger store, kiosk, meeting place of youngsters to drink a beer, now decayed by rust and oblivion. Or the midget and alienated woman from market Nº 4, which is seen with dresses on but usually wonders naked on the corner where she was photographed. A sort of Velázquez’ “menina” , but stemming from misery.
In the book’s central part one can watch the “train photos”, such as Bittar Perinetti always called them. These escape from the former concept. The photographer has no debts to pay. He does have an involuntary feeling of acknowledging his ancestors since he comes from a family strongly related to rails. Several of them worked in the train. He may have found, unwillingly, a remote origin of his roots. He had first done this same essay in color, in 35mm slides. Those included here were done a couple of years later, in black and white, with the same 35mm camera. It is hard to learn if the first attempt helped him to mature the second and definitive one. I mean definitive because here he showed everything he meant to say about it. Definitive it is, because the rail train has disappeared from the landscape. What I can certainly assure is that this second collection has little to do with the first one, because it is obvious that the idea jelled after a long reflexive process.
The travel by train from Asunción to Encarnación, about 400 kilometers (249 miles) was tiresome. The wooden seats were hard, the wagons were hot in summer, and cold in winter. The train’s maximum speed was 25km per hour (15,5 miles per hour). To be able to complete this series of photos, Bittar Perinetti had to travel several times. From those travels are the most beautiful images probably existing at present of what is today gone. There is a certain nostalgia of what once was, a presage of the coming final destiny, and the landscape no longer requires Stevenson’s advice to “enjoy unpleasant places”. The place itself contributes to the disarticulation between the steam train and the present high speed trains and the loneliness of the nature devouring men. All the former is summarized in the photo of the train passing by an iron bridge, far away, while in close up some women do their laundry in the river.
From the Sapucai tool rooms a few shots are included. It is the same workshop that reaches us through time from the Industrial Revolution, with all its original elements, its organization, its distribution and water steam as an energy resource. The vision is though a wide stirring wheel of which rays are blurred by the spinning speed, setting into movement the whole machinery. Bittar Perinetti’s pictures are direct. Between these images and the viewer there is nothing but emotion. In the same way than before, between the photographer and the spectator, the interest of compromise with the image itself was standing, beyond the camera.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in May 1996: “The art which exploited its own disappearance and that of its object was still a great piece of work. But how about the art that plays to recycle indefinitely taking hold of reality? And it turns out that most of contemporary art is exactly about this: Take hold of trivia, residues and mediocrity as both value and ideology. In the many art installations and performances there is just a compromise with the situation and at the same time with all past forms of the history of art. A confession of non-originality, triviality and void turned into a value, and even in a perverse esthetical joy” (4).
I stand against the art interpretation in the sense meant by Susan Sontag. But it must be pointed out that it is precisely in direct photography, with no artifices or manipulations, no farfetched or mannerisms that mean to convey the “esthetic touch” to overcome the bother for some people, reproduction fidelity of the photography, where its esthetical value and absolute modernity of its language is found.
In this sense, photography and film constitute the most modern of visual arts. The empowering of the trivia, of the mediocre does not convert its content into either frivolous or mediocre, but translates it to its own language as a means to show evidence of such residues, but never to raise them to the art category.
Susan Sontag says, regarding the interpretation of works of art process: “In certain cultural contexts the interpretation is a liberating act. It is a way of revising, inappropriate evaluation and avoiding the dead past. In other cultural context it is reactionary, impertinent, coward, suffocating (…) The present time is one of those eras when the performance attitude is mostly reactionary, suffocating. The effusion of interpretation of art today poisons our sensibilities as much as the vehicles’ and heavy industrial machinery’s toxic gas thins the urban atmosphere. Within a culture whose already classic dilemma is a hypertrophy of intellect at the expense of energy and sensory capacities, the interpretation is a revenge taken by intellect upon art. And yet more, it is the revenge taken by intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, reduce the world (“this world”! As if there was another one). The world, our world, is already reduced and impoverished enough. Let us discard, then, all of its duplicates, until we experiment more immediately all we have” (5).
For that matter, in the same book, Sontag maintains that what we need is to learn to see further, hear further, feel further. In short, she means to develop and sharpen our senses, that is, to make our senses grow.
We can start this learning exercise right now, facing images that propose just this: Enjoy them by themselves, with no need of intermediation.
