To this day, the question of when and why a photograph of the world becomes a work of art remains unanswered. Ever since a machine capable of capturing images of our surrounding reality was invented, we have lived with a sense that there is a “true” external image – not in a special, elite form, but as something that represents a chance to reassure ourselves on a mass scale about our immediate environment. In the meantime, there are probably billions of photographic images in this world, preserving all sorts of events, from ordinary to special, for posterity. How often family photo albums are opened up in the attempt to give memory the power of solid evidence. That’s the way so-and-so looked: a person who has long since disappeared from the earth, but whose existence is proved by the photo. Countless lives not inscribed in history through special deeds are maintained in these private archives, as long as there is some kind of interest in them. In the old days, only the stories told about grandmother, uncle, or brother helped to retain the memory of them. Told by those still alive, who had witnessed their lives. The photograph goes far beyond this. It can also convey something about a life even when no one who remembers this life is left alive, when even the name of the person in the picture is unknown. Thousands of these photographs, having accidentally escaped destruction, can be found at flea markets, waiting for someone who will be interested in them, someone who, despite the anonymity of the person depicted, sees something in the photo that should be kept. In the meantime, there are now large collections of anonymous photographs that can provide no specific information – no names, no dates – about either the photographs or the people in them. Not every photograph finds its way into such a collection – only those that contain, in the eyes of the beholder, a quality beyond the ordinary. They have touched upon something normally ascribed to artistic photography – behind which, however, is always hidden an experienced subject, a well-known photographer. Here, we usually discover a different state, one that remains hidden to the naked eye until the photograph reveals it. Yet how do we reach this obviously different visual space? Do photographers regarded as artists have a sixth sense that distinguishes them from the masses who take photographs? In order to answer this question, it is helpful to look at collections of anonymous photographs. They are free of any influence – a school of photography or a famous name, for instance: something that guarantees quality all by itself. Arguments made in defense of a photographic image have to be chosen carefully. To present this type of plea, it is necessary to make exacting observations – still the most important thing in the reception of photographs. It is precisely because we imagine that photographs reproduce reality, and thus are, apparently, the closest things to reality itself, that we have to examine them thoroughly.

South African photographer Pierre Crocquet de Rosemond, born in 1971 in Cape Town, became famous for photographs whose unvarnished sense of reality demands just this of viewers. They should stay as long as possible in the space where his pictures hang, looking at the faces and their surroundings, in order to become aware of what made them attractive in the first place, the ultimate reason for taking the picture. Yet it might be objected that looking at photographs is a matter of course. It could also be said that the motifs Crocquet finds, most of them in South Africa and Africa, are already so unusual that a European, for instance, would naturally want to take a closer look at these worlds of images. However, even a superficial observation starts to make it clear that Crocquet is not looking for African exoticism, but rather, for human life – a life that can no longer be confined to a single country. Everywhere around the world, it is at home in a similar way. Basically, it does not matter at all where Crocquet takes his photographs; he could have found similar motifs in almost every region on earth, including Europe.
Crocquet is not seeking to capture social strata in their different circumstances, reflected in physiognomies and their environments. Instead, he chronicles marginal lives and simple people who are susceptible to being forced suddenly into poverty. Occasionally, just a few undesired events, for which no one is to blame, are sufficient. The portraits do not feature the names of the people depicted – just titles suggesting that what is shown might refer to a general something beyond a specific life or place, turning life itself into a metaphor for a particular fate.
Below the black-and-white photograph of a man with a cat on his lap, the man’s name is not given; instead, we find the word fate. It is a seemingly ordinary situation, certainly for this man. Now, however, it is time to “read” the photograph more precisely, and it is at this moment, at the latest, that the question arises of how many ways there might be to read it. If, for instance, this man’s neighbor were to look at the photo, he might simply consider it a good, or maybe bad, likeness of his neighbor; he might also be able to tell us one or two episodes from this man’s life; he might characterize him, judge him, or even remain indifferently silent. My perspective, which is not supposed to be absorbed into a strange “man,” first sees the watery, bright eyes in a haggard, wrinkled face; the heavily lined forehead, the bags under the eyes, the sunken cheeks, the deep folds to the right and left of the straight nose, leading down to the still-beautiful, half-open mouth. The hair is thick and dark; the man’s age is hard to guess. In this man’s memory, the suffering articulated in his face is linked to events I know nothing about, but which have left behind deep, visible traces. The sofa upon which the man sits with his well-fed cat – perhaps the only creature who still seeks out his company and feels comfortable with him – is marked by time, like a repetition of his face. It might once have been a good piece of furniture, but it has long since frayed; the padding an upholsterer once placed under the fabric is exposed, like the insides of an open cadaver. It might be where the man sleeps; it might even be outdoors. Next to the two pillows on the outer left are three utensils, references to his activity before the photograph was shot – activity that will be taken up again later: the full ashtray refers to the smoker; behind and to the left, the odd piece of leather with a wire handle is probably a fly swatter as well as a cat toy. The folded dark bag in front contains the tobacco the man uses to roll his own cigarettes. In an odd contrast to the items just described, his clothing is casually elegant; the corners of a white shirt collar project from underneath an old sweater; a watch with a metal armband can be seen on his wrist; the hands, scarred by hard work, are helplessly bent, as if gouty; the left hand rests in his lap, holding the cat’s tail – a gesture the cat is familiar with. There is something conciliatory about the equanimity of the animal also looking out of the picture. Animals seem imperturbable: they are not obsessed with their own fates, and know nothing of the disastrous relationships people have with each other, nothing of loneliness, nothing of unhappiness and downward social mobility, and this imperturbability is also comforting to the unnamed stranger in the photo. Crocquet has photographed this man several times: even once in a white striped shirt and neatly pressed trousers, hair combed, sitting on the edge of a grave. The title, Bloodline, indicates the fact that this is probably the resting place of his father, one Matthys Johannes Nortje, who lived to be eighty-one, and whose family, if I am right about the name, originally came from one of the northern European countries. A third photo shows our man in profile, awakened from a nap by the gleaming light of the sun, looking indifferently at the camera. The sofas, one of them by now familiar to us, are, in their torn state, memento moris, metaphors for death that seem to refer to the man, to a life that is now simply meaningless: Killing Time.
With his camera, Pierre Crocquet observes the sadness of the cemeteries, the human being’s last resting place. Modern society’s tastelessness degrades these once revered resting places, turning them into absurd collections of plastic chairs and party tents, a fake stage where last farewells are expressed. In Exit, the photographer stands behind the coffin in a narrow, bunkerlike chapel, guiding the eye past the wood to the desolate gravesite. A moving image of young men in white shirts, their jackets draped over a headstone, shoveling dirt into the open grave into which the coffin has just been lowered, lacks any trace of sorrow at first glance; then one spots the group of three people behind and to the right, crying over the departed. Obviously, the ambivalence of events, the presence of opposites, are things the photographer seeks.
Motifs selected by the photographer are varied, not simply taken from the sad sides of life. He is not looking for the cheap sensation, the original image, but for human life. Both young and old people appear in his pictures, and the secret of life is reflected in their faces. Pet, the well-fed, self-satisfied young woman, is one of them, as is the elderly lady with the white hair in Toe-hold. The people in the photographs almost always look into the camera – directly at the viewer. These are not staged scenes, not strangers moving around in front of the camera; they are impressive portraits that capture personality in a convincing way. The photographer is rewarded with the rare moment in which something is concentrated in the gaze, in the face, permitting the viewer to look deep into the soul of the other, so that for a brief moment, his very private secrets are exposed to the eyes of strangers. It is always about human beauty, even when a person’s fate has been terrible. An amputee, his legs cut off to his hips, sitting in a wheelchair in front of a clothesline upon which jeans that could not be his own are drying, conveys his proud determination not to give up.

Pierre Crocquet de Rosemond loves the people he photographs. Tenderly, he observes their shortcomings, their hard lives, and their strength. Never does he compromise their existence, even when shooting things that are absurd, surreal – like the woman at her morning coffee, next to a pig’s head in a bowl. His images are not ideological; they do not assume any sort of perspective. Instead, he leaves it up to the viewer to decide how to look at them. Everything is spread out in front of him: a tale about life, naturally sharp down to the last fold, from which one cannot easily pull away.

Photography is, however, a complex endeavor. No photographic narrative is ever less than the sum of its parts. While a picture is always about something out there, it is also always about the photographer’s eye. No photograph describes the world without simultaneously describing the photographer. What details the camera unites in a photograph will narrate the frame of the picture space. Through the sheer act of editing the world, they are always a reflection of the eye, hand, brain and human heart of the maker. Photographs tend to invite the viewer to “read into the picture” but really, description should be enough. No embellishment is needed if the drama of the world, reduced to two dimensions and an array of grays and blacks and whites is convincingly conveyed. The cover of this book is littered with visual signifiers generating a psychological complexity only photography can attain. A young black African, a boy, accompanies a doubly amputated old Afrikaner on the side of a dusty road. They are measured not only by the camera and its submarine angle, hugging the ground, but also by the contrasts between the sitters: youth and age; black skin and white; the first smooth and lovely; the latter chiseled and wizened. A pair of lampposts in the background frames an empty space emphasizing the boy’s height against the man’s lost stature. The crossbars of the wheelchair’s frame are startlingly revealed by the loss of the old man’s legs. Describing is narrative; description is enough.

Croquet’s portraits are situational documents, environmental tableaus; his subjects convey an intimate allegiance to their surroundings. What one notices immediately is that the people he photographs are done so, mostly, with the accoutrements of their lives – their tools, their furniture, their clothes and their fellow South Afrikaners. They are nearly inseparable; they can’t be extricated from their surroundings or from each other. A weathered woman knits in the sunlight while seated at what appears at first to be an impossibly tangled mesh top table and matching chairs, the geometry of which suggests an intricate trompe l’œil of her own genesis, from her own hand. Upon close inspection however, it is simply the organization of the seating arrangement that makes the scene so puzzling. Visually, she is woven into the furniture in an uncertain space while reigning over the entire scene, a celestial queen weaving endlessly, drawn in a constellation of steel frames, hemp lattice and wool yarn.

Ever since Walker Evans faced the American vernacular landscape and its people, photographers have used the medium to elevate the banal into the sublime by allowing the medium’s power of description and its inalienable status as a cousin of reality to impart and, therefore, instruct us to see the central importance of how what we surround us with drives life. Evans, along with the writer James Agee, traveled during the summer of 1936, taking notes and creating dozens of pictures describing the life, times, domiciles, vocations and community of white sharecropper families during the Great Depression in Alabama, resulting in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Of all the pictures included, one stands apart as a paean of exalted description, a picture so simple and direct, yet so transcendental it pictures heaven as easily as it details hell. “Kitchen Wall in Bud Field’s Home, Hale County, Alabama, Summer 1936” is essentially a still life, a stripped down, minimalist and modern equivalent of the 17th century Dutch genre. On a wall barely insulated from the outdoors, a handful of eating utensils, not nearly enough for each family member to have its own set, hang vertically in a makeshift holder nailed to the wall. Magically, they appear to float in space, unattached and free, held aloft invisibly as if by angels. This effect, caused by a repeating motif of darker shapes below the holder that echo it as if they were shadows cast by lights above, elevating this scene to a higher plane, stripping it of its pedantic banality, creates a spiritually unique experience – the photographic equivalent of turning water into wine. Evans saw Bud Field’s kitchen wall metonymically; a stand in double for all that wrapped itself around the lives of the poor, the dispossessed, and the beholden. As such, it is the precedent to Pierre Crocquet’s essay in purpose and effect.

Books are surveyed word-by-word, page-by-page, picture-by-picture. “Enter/Exit” like any good novel or play; has a cumulative effect, developing themes and directions as it progresses. Each mise en scène of Crocquet’s choosing plays off its predecessors and informs its successors, expanding the parameters of the book’s characters and enriching our world as well. Each being, within each scene, builds on itself and like after any good story is told, leaves the viewer sensing that the world is bigger, a little stranger and understood more but known less than before.