MARGHERITA CHIARVA
WE LOVE WOMEN
PHOTOS BY CLAIRE O'KEEFE
Margherita Chiarva is a photographer based in Ibiza, surrounded by two of her greatest inspirations: nature and the sea; working with experimental analogue techniques: manipulating film manually, printing on rare types of paper, chemical development and personal revelation. She pushes the limits of the medium to abstraction;
painting with light, the true origins of the word photographia, coined by Hercules Florence who in 1833, on a trip to the Brazilian Rainforest, discovered ways of fixing camera obscura images.
“Analogue photography is very much alive. It works with elements like light and time and tangible spaces. I like to twist the enormous potentials of materials in every possible direction, light included, deconstruct orientations and stretch the concept of photography as we know it.”
The human eye works very much like a camera obscura, with rays of light entering an opening (the pupil), focusing through a convex lens and passing a dark chamber before forming an inverted image on a smooth surface (the retina). From her own pinhole camera experiments to chemical manipulations it is as if Margherita wants to turn our vision further inward still, towards the mind’s eye:
“Thats why I’ve been working on abstract forms, creating new realities that will guide the mind to imagine rather than being manipulated with half-truths and shameless fictions that we often encounter in this digital era. I am not interested in representing reality as it is, mostly in an era where everything is shared. I am interested in feeling the images and work with my subconscious through light and chemicals. It is technically photography but at the same time a very meditative inner practice"
Many of her images remind us of phosphenes or the nimitta flashes of light or colour one might see when deep in meditation or on psychedelic drugs, opening the doors of perception, turning inner visions into art.
“Art came as a form of exploration. It was always a door to explore inner and outer spaces - how essential to transform this research into something tangible!”
Her work is a psychedelic experience, inherently feminist and subversive. In her essay ‘Psychedelic feminism: a radical interpretation of psychedelic consciousness?’, Kim Hewitt argues that the psychedelic experience is essentially feminine in nature:
“Altered states of consciousness challenge our culturally constructed concepts of the body, individuality, gender, time, and every other bounded category structured by linear human thought. A foray into expanded consciousness is a plunge into the realm of the symbolic feminine…The symbolic feminine (a concept, not a gender) is everything that has been repressed, misrepresented, or marginalized by the Western narrative of progress and encompasses what has been excised as unnecessary, a threat, or excess: irrationality, the unconscious, emotion, imagination, play, mystery, and pleasure without purpose or closure.”
Margherita’s work challenges our culturally constructed concept of photography, disrupts the grammar of her discipline and demands we slow down and turn our vision inwards, creating our own perception of reality or clearing space for new alternative future visions:
“I’ve spent so many years asking myself about the archaeology of visual processes and the meaning of photography. However, in the interim much has changed and photography is not the same. We are bombed by endless images that pollute our brains, what I seek now in my work is a slow movement of this art. Our eyes and brains would need a collective break from images. They are loosing credibility, the visual impact of a photo of today has much less strength than 30 years ago. Sometimes I look at the horizon and I clear my vision ready for new adventures.”
In her seminal book On Photography, Susan Sontag states that:
“In order to designate reality, Buddhism says sunya, the void: but better still tahata, tat = that – It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself – a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe. A “Blind field” is created, is divined – everything surrounding that moment where the figure is “fastened down like a butterfly”
“A photograph never tells the truth, it’s always a point of view, as memory is. I don’t see it as a mirror but rather a hole where light enters and makes its way into a magical process that ends with a testimony of a lucky moment that got partially captured and manipulated by the author.”
With the pinhole camera, like the eye, the image appears inverted like Alice Through the Looking Glass, an upside-down, back-to front world, where if we look for meaning we must “take care of the sounds and the sense will take care of itself” correcting the image in our minds to interpret it. The projection of inverted images is actually a physical principle of optics that predates the emergence of life itself, raising many questions about
cognition and perception.
Many philosophers and scientists throughout history have long pondered on the contradiction between light travelling in straight lines and the formation of round spots of light behind differently shaped apertures, until it became generally accepted that the circular and crescent-shapes described Aristotle’s work Problems – Book XV were pinhole image projections of the sun:
Many philosophers and scientists throughout history have long pondered on the contradiction between light travelling in straight lines and the formation of round spots of light behind differently shaped apertures, until it became generally accepted that the circular and crescent-shapes described Aristotle’s work Problems – Book XV were pinhole image projections of the sun:
“Why is it that an eclipse of the sun, if one looks at it through a sieve or through leaves, such as a plane-tree or other broadleaved tree, or if one joins the fingers of one hand over the fingers of the other, the rays are crescent-shaped where they reach the earth? Is it for the same reason as that when light shines through a rectangular peep-hole, it appears circular in the form of a cone?”
Margherita’s work uses both circular and crescent shapes and bends not just light and space but also time to create an eternal present. Where time seems to be experienced in linear form, here it slows right down feeling circular, soft and feminine. Where Barthes said that “cameras are clocks for seeing”, here they are sundials for feeling and perceiving:
“In analogue photography the process of creating an image is as important as the result itself. It has a ritualistic aspect to it: creating the chemicals to develop, counting the right time, smelling the paper, reading the light to understand time. All this is so far away from the digital world. Modern technologies offer a great improvement in gaining time but we are loosing a lot in terms of sensitivity and quality.
Mistakes in analogue photography are ofter trailblazers for new techniques or projects. I love to let chance suggest me what will be next. I trust and follow the process in all its forms.”
It is the imperfections that make the magic in Margherita’s work, blurring the boundaries of reality and leaving space in the viewer’s mind’s eye to imagine their own.
Like the origins of photography where silver nitrate was used to fix the image giving analogue photography its French denomination argentique, Chiarva often uses the element in her experimental process. Silver is a soft, white, lustrous transition metal, exhibiting the highest electrical conductivity, thermal conductivity, and reflectivity of any metal. 1 Some say it comes from other stars transported on fallen meteorites. In folklore, silver was commonly thought to have mystic powers including the ability to detect poison and aiding passage into the mythical realm of fairies.
A photograph emanates radiations that touch us like ‘delayed rays of a star’, as Susan Sontag says 2 , a sort of umbilical cord linking worlds through light, and Margherita Chiarvi’s photographs certainly act as portals to another realm of pure, sublime, feminine beauty.
“Feminine beauty is like a flower blooming. There is no effort in a flower blooming yet the most magical process we can witness. This inner, innate strength that thrives in all its colour when we are mature enough. All women are beautiful and together we are medicine.”
1 Poole, Charles P. Jr.. Encyclopedic Dictionary of Condensed Matter Physics. (Academic Press, 2004)
2 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977)