Kristin Fouquet
Photographer Extraordinaire
5 photograph mini critiques
By Don Pesavento
Above Ground Tomb
Photographer extraordinaire Kristin Fouquet has Eurydice-like returned from the Underground to share with us this black and white muted chiaroscuro snapshot of an umbral Netherworld edifice. The tomb seemingly exists a stone's throw away from us, almost within reach. Facing the crypt, we stand wet-shoed, and marrow soaked on gritty, gray rain puddle-pocked cinder gravel dull-silver tarnished beneath an overcast white-noise dissonant sky, our squinting eyes exploring her photo vision-quest dreamscape of the phantasmal-spectral; sibling children peering over Father Time’s broad shoulders, gazing upon a fingerprint-smudged photo held in his hands image-blurred in funereal contemplation. Fouquet's motif range is expansive. Antithetical to the Fat-Tuesday Mardi Gras tones of Kristin’s “Costumed Couple,” this photo's clay colored Lenten aura evokes traces of Ash Wednesday thumb-smeared forehead ashes.
Perhaps, this photo is of a local parish cemetery housing nocturnal vestiges of lives night-tide memory washed away like the Gulf surf. And yet, the photo sculpture exudes an erected lighthouse permanence, portal-transporting us beyond the Louisiana regional familiar and beacon-illuminating Hades’ shadow realms of the phantasmagorical fantastique. The photo is a riddle of the box, suspended in mystery, enigmatic as to who or what lies within its somber, stony chamber, deeply hermetic and crepuscular as Salvatore Quasimodo's mystical crematory poem, “Metamorphoses in the Urn of the Saint” emanating the marvelous unseen:
The dead mature; with them, my heart. Self-pity is earth’s final humor… A memory of darkness is born At the bottom of walled-in wells…
The monument might embody the eternal-rest artifice of a local plumber, accountant, bayou fisherman, florist, teacher, or Zydeco accordionist. Perhaps, a sepulcher-interred French Knight Templar's chain-mail caressed skull's gaping mouth whose Time-peeled visage lips once prayer-kissed a crucifix before a midnight battle siege outside the flickering torch-lit walls of Jerusalem. We sense the Crusader's beard hair relic-stirring within its “more slowly” decomposing damp-cement chamber and hear the cancellous femur-bone trabeculae latticework crumbling within its reliquary Past, echoing Rilke's poem “Portrait of My Father as a Young Man” in which he holds:
“this slowly fading daguerreotype in my more slowly disappearing hands”
Outside, the tomb’s weather-worn illegible facade waits like a tabula rasa for our inscription, as found in W.B. Yeats' epitaph:
CAST A COLD EYE ON LIFE, ON DEATH HORSEMEN,
PASS BY!
Beyond legacy, what remains of one's life is memory memorialized by this tomb whose mission is remembrance, ultimately, dissolving in long-forgotten Time, as expressed in Percy Shelley's “Ozymandias” sonnet:
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
This photograph is a wondrous thing, visually true, and transcendent, conjuring up Hamlet's words:
“Therein lies the rub. For in that sleep of death we know not what dreams may come...”
Twin Bridges
Even without tinted protective goggles, we can discern the stark sun nuclear fire ball supernova radiating center stage within the glaring cloud horizon; a subliminal post-apocalyptic 911 Twin Tower megaton dirty bomb terror-scape raising the arrector pili hairs on Mother Earth's skin on end like the bulrush blades bristling skyward from the bottom of the photo. The beauty within this photograph emanates from its exquisite symmetry, evocative of poet William Blake's “Tiger” ending quatrain:
Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
The photo gives the illusion that the bridges curve, bending away from each other, repelled as if magnet polarized. And we come to camera-grips with the visionary talent of the photographer who had the artistic wherewithal to appreciate the scene and take the picture. The twin bridges are metal constructions devoid of blood and bone and yet elicit human dichotomies of existential choices in our lives, revealing mini epiphanies revealed in quietude, similar to Robert Frost's "The Road Not Chosen." On a heightened, intimate plane of emotive immediacy, the twin bridges become dualities of self-reflection; metaphorical crossing-overs, life's bridges not crossed, traveled only half way in fear or trepidation, bridges not even dared set foot upon, bridges in our lives, built or burned, bridges to the Future, to the Past, bridges to Heaven, to Hell, bridges to good, to evil, bridges to success, to ignominy, bridges of spiritual succor over troubled waters, bridges leading to life, and bridges collapsing into despair-turbulent rivers and oceans
like London's overlooking the Thames, or San Francisco's Golden Gate off which so many tormented souls have flung themselves plummeting into watery oblivion.
And yet, this photo also elicits a sense of humankind affirmations. Monuments built by men, majestic as Brooklyn's, immortalized in Mayakovsky's poem "Brooklyn Bridge" that traverse the gap between science and religion, reassuring us that we are not merely life's prisoners, doomed to Calvinistic predestined Fate, but sentient free-willed fellow travelers making choices that determine our final-destination arrivals and departures. The Doors' Jim Morrison's passionate exhortation to "Break on through to the other side" becomes reprised as “Cross on over through to the other side.” And Kristin's photo has guided us there, twice.
Sorrow
Unlike Michelangelo’s Pieta sculpted pathos, painfully revealing Mary’s disconsolate countenance, this photo’s sorrowful stone face reposed in melancholy dejection remains hidden from our eyes' scrutiny. The burden of the world weighs down upon her head that once faced the world, now heavy-bowed down under its pressures. Her solitary sadness might be due to an empathetic angst of weltschmerz world sorrow, profound depression, emotional exasperation, unrequited or lost love. We can only surmise as to its etiology. The archetypal, concaved lips of the mask of tragedy and sad clown Emmett Kelly's frowning mouth are readily appreciated in full view. However, here we are left to deduce the subject’s facial expression by intuitively “reading” her body language posture. Her eyes are undoubtedly closed, looking deeply inward within herself.
We follow the languid wavy contours of her trapezius muscle, traversed by the gown’s left button-gathered strap, stirring emotions accentuated by the vertebra prominens (C7, shown clearly by the sculptor) of her elegant neck, centered between her downward sloping shoulders, seemingly irrevocably resolved to suffering. Her skin appears blemished in places, notably the left shoulder, subliminally eliciting the shame-dirt of abuse, bruises, and violated feminine sensibilities.
Her elegant hair style is reminiscent of the Napoleonic Empire period (circa 1804), and in turn, recalls and decries the diabolically grisly “humane” executions by Doctor Guillotine’s heinous device during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. The romantic in me feels she may have lost in love, or received news of her betrothed soldier killed in battle (left hand not shown, engagement/wedding ring)? The realist in me suggests the profundity of her sorrow may be like that of a prisoner, awaiting her dreadful fate at the blade of a guillotine. We share her sadness, becoming fellow drinkers of the waters of Akheron (Hades’ River of sorrow) and, as suggested by John Keats’ “Ode on Melancholy” the viewer of the photo becomes:
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries.
For shade to shade will come too drowsily, And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud. She dwells with Beauty Beauty that must die…
