Archaeology of refraction: temporality and subject in George Seferis’ photographs

$: Archaeology of refraction: temporality and subject in George Seferis’ photographs$
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© Copyrighted Material

© Copyrighted Material169

From Camera Graeca: Photographs, Narratives, Materialities, eds Philip Carabott, Yannis Hamilakis and Eleni Papargyriou. Copyright © 2015 by the Centre for Hellenic Studies. Published by Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Wey Court East, Union Road, Farnham, Surrey, GU9 7PT, Great Britain.

8

Archaeology of Refraction: Temporality and Subject in

George Seferis’s PhotographsTheodoros Chiotis

‘There is a percentage of expression belonging to the material that is independent from its maker; I am not certain whether I would call this a random occurrence. The maker of worth is distinguished by the conjunction achieved between his own will and the will of the material ’

(Seferis 1975a: 73). Perception of an object costsPrecise the Object’s loss –Perception in itself a GainReplying to its Price –The Object Absolute – is nought –Perception sets it fairAnd then upbraids a PerfectnessThat situates so far –

Emily Dickinson(Dickinson 1960: 486–7)

Visual horizon1

Photography has often been considered the supplement to the written word. As such, photography and literature have long had a symbiotic if somewhat uneasy relationship. Michael Ignatieff in The Russian Album succinctly notes: ‘More often than not photographs subvert the continuity that memory weaves out of experience […]. Memory heals the wounds of time. Photography documents the wounds’

1 The title of this part of the chapter comes from the diary entry dated 8 February 1926: ‘In the same way that we have a visual horizon, we can imagine having an aural horizon, an olfactory horizon, a horizon pertaining to corporeal pain, etc. Man is closed within these circles’ (Seferis 1975a: 42).

© 2015From Philip Carabott, Yannis Hamilakis and Eleni Papargyriou (eds), Camera Graeca: Photographs,

Narratives, Materialities, published by Ashgate Publishing. See: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472424761

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CAMERA GRAECA: PHOTOGRAPHS, NARRATIVES, MATERIALITIES170

(Ignatieff 1987: 7). Ignatieff constructs a model of photography as an apparatus of recollection and documentation. Recollection and documentation act as traces of the historical wound, often altering one’s memories. Memory, or to be more precise the memory of time lived, is subordinated to the ability of the medium, photography, to cut a piece of time and preserve it for posterity. Photography (and, by implication, the photographer’s subjectivity) creates a narrative supplement while simultaneously modifying not only actual memories but also the very concept of memory. Photography functions as a flattened archive – into which complex personal and collective histories have been folded. The effect of memory on the construction of subjectivity is the implied aspect in all of photography; photography arises from a discourse indirectly acknowledging the variables affecting the photographer’s subjectivity. Photography acts as the archive of the photographer’s response to the world beyond the camera lens. The camera takes on the function of an investigative agent searching for variations on the truth of the world. Photography in this way becomes an event of perception itself, a mode of seeing (Sutton 2009: 108): the world captured in the picture divulges a new way of seeing and thinking about the world and a subtle rupture in the temporality of the world captured in the photograph is effected. The subject observing the photograph repositions itself in relation with the world: recollection and representation obviate the difference between perception of reality and variations of that very perception of reality as it collapses onto the flat surface of the picture. Photography preserves the moment when reality as the variation of the present moment is captured onto the film of the camera.

In this chapter, I investigate how one of Greece’s foremost poets of the twentieth century, George Seferis, uses photography to expose the internalised progression of a subject becoming in time. In Seferis’s photographs, one can infer a subjectivity employing photography as a tool auditing and underwriting that which cannot be adequately captured in narrative, namely the passage of time. Seferis’s photographs work both as a means of construing how time and memory are folded in photography but also how photography allows the poet to interact with the world in ways hitherto unexpected. Seferis’s photographs do not simply capture the image of the past: they refract, rather than organise, time and memory. Seferis as photographer frames his pictures by performing the ‘reverse archaeology’ he referred to in Meres, his personal diary: the poet’s photographs attempt to assemble an alternate history of a personal experience of time; an experience of time that is marked by a multitude of temporalities. In effect, Seferis’s photographs excavate the history of one’s own experience of duration.

Although he was an enthusiastic photographer, Seferis never published a book collecting his photographs.2 According to the testimony of his wife, Maro, the poet approached and used photography as a memory-aid for his poetry

2 A selection of Seferis’s photographs has been published in an album issued by the Cultural Foundation of the Greek National Bank (Seferis 2000), while a further selection of photographs has been published in Kasdaglis 1990, Seferis 1999, Seferis 2005 and Seferis 2010. Of interest are also the publications by Georgis 2004 and Papageorgiou-Venetas 2006.

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ARCHAEOLOGY OF REFRACTION 171

rather than as an art in itself. His output, however, seems to suggest otherwise (Papargyriou 2008: 82). The main themes of Seferis’s photography, as Papargyriou notes, can be broken down into three categories: landscapes, ancient ruins and urban architecture, with marked emphasis on dilapidated buildings and people. The photographs that Seferis took throughout his life attempt to negotiate the trauma of modernity (ibid.). Indeed, we could extend Papargyriou’s claim even further by arguing that in his photography, Seferis documents the aftermath of a modernist sublime. Seferis’s photographs register a shift in one’s perception of mortality and existential stability. The viewer of Seferis’s photographs is confronted with a sense of an excess of meaning and signification, a signature trait of modernity.

Regardless of whether they are austere images of landscapes, buildings or people, Seferis’s photographs foreground the consciousness of the photographer as it comes in contact with the material. Sarah Kofman reminds us that Descartes inferred that ‘there is no resemblance between object and image. It is the mind that sees, not the eye, and the mind is consciousness without point of view’ (Kofman 1998: 52). The object effectively disappears onto the flat surface of the image.

Seferis’s photographs pare away layers of the real in order to reveal how photography might reflect perceptions back at the viewer. The experience of time is further underlined by the refraction of time in Seferis’s photographic subject matter. The images in Seferis’s photographic oeuvre reveal how the present’s relationship with the past is conceived (Sutton 2009: 160).3 Bergson notes that ‘to perceive means to immobilize’ (1991: 275). Photography as a prosthetic tool of memory immobilises perception and aids the recollection of the past even if the moments recollected are characterised by fragmentation. Seferis himself had noted: ‘Remembrance devoured my memory’ (1975a: 31). Seferis’s words imply that recollection, that is to say, the ‘necessary poverty’ of representation, recreates the world and subjectivity through an act of discernment (cf. Bergson 1991: 38). The poet brings to the fore the mechanisms of memory and insinuates a rupture in traditional chronology: the act of recollection, with its attendant multiplicity and variation, has eroded the images stored in memory. Perception is thus re-attached to the real. Bergson, in his seminal work Matter and Memory, had noted:

We become conscious of these mechanisms as they come into play; this consciousness of a whole past of efforts stored up in the present is indeed also a memory, but a memory profoundly different from the first, always bent upon action, seated in the present and looking only to the future. It has retained from the past only the intelligently coordinated movements which rep resent the accumulated efforts of the past; it recovers those past efforts, not in the memory-images which recall them, but in the definite order and systematic character with

3 Deleuze notes that ‘we find ourselves in a movement … by which the “present” that endures divides at each ‘instant’ into two different directions, one oriented and dilated towards the past, the other contracted, contracting toward the future’ (1997: 38).



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which the actual move ments take place. In truth it no longer represents our past to us, it acts it; and if it still deserves the name of memory, it is not because it conserves bygone images, but because it prolongs their useful effect into the present moment (Bergson 1991: 82).

Our perception of ourselves is created and preserved through the extension of memory-images into the present. Expanding on Bergson, Lyn Hejinian notes that ‘it is the task of art to preserve disappearance’ (2003: 80). Photographs create a perception of oneself through recollection. The memorialisation of identity occurs through the medium of photography: ‘the photograph presents the ‘I’ in the photograph as at once a flesh-and-blood subject and a dematerialised phantom of an invisible photographer’ (Smith and Watson 2010: 175). In Seferis’s photographs, perception coincides with the image of duration (Deleuze 1997: 52). Thus, photography for Seferis becomes an art of re-creative perception; the art of recollecting the world in its absence:

Whenever we are trying to recover a recollection, to call up some period of our history, we become conscious of a sui generis act by which we detach ourselves from the present in order to replace ourselves, first, in the past in general, then, in a certain region of the past – a work of adjustment, something like the focusing of a camera (Bergson 1991: 133–4; cf. Laruelle 2012: 20).

So what could Seferis the poet have to do with photography if he is not himself a professional photographer? If poetry for Seferis is a way of discovering a personal voice to articulate his view of the world, then photography might be seen as a way of reconceptualising the way he sees the world. Referring to N. Scott Momaday’s autobiography with pictures, The Name, Paul Jay notes on the effect of visual memory-aids on the imagination: ‘Memory begins to qualify the imagination, to give it another formation, one that is peculiar to the self ’ ( Jay 1994: 204). Jay is referring to the formative (and, perhaps transformative) effect photography might have on the photographer. If Flusser’s statement that ‘a photograph is an image of concepts’ (Flusser 2000: 36) is correct, then taking photography seriously and diligently as Seferis did constitutes a new way of conceiving the world. We might be able to argue that photography contributed to Seferis’s poetic output as we might consider photography as an attempt at a new kind of thinking (Laruelle 2011: 36).

Walter Benjamin tells us that ‘even the most perfect reproduction is lacking one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence in the place where it is at the moment’ (Benjamin: 214); photography introduces to the world the revelation of what is not there, or to be more precise, it introduces the relation of what is not there with the subject. Photography is an ideography (Laruelle 2011: 37), the simultaneous creation and documentation of new ideas and new ways of thinking about the world. Photography enables Seferis to cultivate intuition, ‘the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently



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inexpressible’ (Bergson 1912: 7, original emphasis). Seferis had noted in a diary entry dated Thursday July 15 1926:4

The greatest title a man can have is that of faber, artifex. The greatest grace of nature is letting itself free. If nature frightens us or seems mysterious, it is because it mirrors the mystery and awe of the body, of our organs, of those enemies of our thought and will. It is for this reason that the human soul and nature are and have perpetually been forces in conflict hurting one another using a thousand contrivances and brutalities (Seferis 1975a: 68–9).

The tension between the artificial and the natural is evident in this diary entry, which documents the struggle for an unforced poetic voice. At the time it was written, Seferis was waiting to take the entry exams for the diplomatic service and was preoccupied with literary translation from French, while reading prodigiously.5 It seems that this was a significant period for his poetic development. The photographic practice of Seferis might be argued to have had a formative (maybe even transformative) effect on the development of his thinking and poetic sensibility.

‘… the obscurity of the box’:6 photography and/as the creative act

The ‘heterogeneous complex of codes upon which photography may draw’ (Burgin 2003: 131) might have initially intrigued the poet. The poet makes reference to other media of mechanical reproduction in his oeuvre, such as gramophones. When Seferis refers to mechanical reproduction of some aspect of human presence, his assertion often seems to be accompanied by feelings of uneasiness and frustration. In the poem ‘Tuesday’, the poet notes:

At every corner a gramophone shopin every shop a hundred gramophonesfor each gramophone a hundred recordson every recordsomeone living plays with someone dead.Take the steel needle and separate themif you can (Seferis 1995: 77).

4 Poems by Seferis in this chapter are quoted in Keeley and Sherrard’s translation (1995). Extracts from the novel Six Nights on the Acropolis are quoted in Susan Matthias’s translation (2007). All other excerpts from Greek texts, including Embirikos’s Octana, have been translated by the author.

5 Beaton 2003: 71. It should be noted that the first volume of Seferis’s personal diary, from where this diary comes, was reworked on at least two or three later occasions and the originals destroyed (ibid.: 66).

6 Flusser 2000: 26.



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The work of mechanical reproduction is experienced only in an activity of production (Barthes 1977: 157). The experience of listening to a recording or looking at a photograph beyond a certain period of time intimates the command of experiencing a certain moment captured in the recording or photograph or film (Burgin: 136). The uneasiness accompanying the contemplation of the photograph or the experience of listening to a recording arises not only from the consciousness that the work of art is a place of work (Burgin 2003: 137) but also from the fact that functions of the central nervous system are technologically implemented (Kittler 1999: 28). Art enters an alliance with technology implicitly affecting one’s understanding and experience of the world. In photography, the viewer finds him/herself enmeshed in a web of signifying systems with which one must negotiate (cf. Burgin 2003: 136–7). The subject behind the camera lens is produced in its attempt to create sense out of what it views and experiences; in this way, the subject might also regain some sense of its authority when capturing the world on film in a specific way. In the poem ‘Narration’ Seferis describes the scene as follows:

That man walks along weepingno one can say whysometimes they think he’s weeping for lost loveslike those that torture us so muchon summer beaches with the gramophones (Seferis 1995: 127).

The scene of the gramophones as apparatuses of memory portrays a tableaux-like image of a world within which everything invokes memory (cf. Burgin 2003: 133). Images, external stimuli and different times are superimposed on top of each other: the world is perpetually created anew even if this proves to be an agonising experience.7 The choice of how to frame the picture of the world beyond the camera lens transforms the world into an identifiable object invested with meaning and intensity. It can be argued that the photographer does not so much capture the world but cribs a scene of the world-story he sees unfolding before his eyes. Seferis was adamant that the poet must ultimately create things in his poetry not by describing them but by naming them:

The ultimate goal of the poet is not to describe things but to create them by naming them. This, I think, is his greatest joy. It is for this reason that the poet needs an increasingly precise adjustment when approaching things, an identification. And this identification is always dependent on intensity, never on length or linguistic density (Seferis 2003a: 139).8

7 Deleuze in his discussion of the function of memory in Alain Resnais’ film Je t’aime, Je t’aime notes: ‘This is what happens when the image becomes time-image. The world has become memory, brain, superimposition of ages and lobes, but the brain itself has become consciousness, continuation of ages, creation or growth of ever new lobes, re-creation of matter’ (Deleuze 1989: 125).

8 Deleuze makes a similar points when talking about Thomas Hardy: ‘his characters are not people or subjects, they are collections of intensive sensations, each is such a collection, a packet, a bloc



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This statement is interesting for a number of reasons. For one, Seferis here is uncoupling description, that is to say mimetic copying, from the practice of poetry; and it seems he is quite a sceptic when it comes to the idea of creating art through reproduction of any sort. Laruelle makes a similar point when he notes that the photographer ‘“gives” to things – manifesting as it is, without producing or transforming it – their real identity’ (2011: 56). The creative act is dependent not so much on the mimetic function of art as it is on the transformative process inherent in art. Art invents and transforms the present moment.

Seferis’s words quoted as the first of this chapter’s epigraphs allude to the fact that the work of art itself plays a significant role in whatever final form it takes. It is through the creative process that the artwork takes a form hitherto unseen that is not only unique but also the expression of the pursuit for producing new ways of interacting with the world. Seferis thus seems to intimate the transformative effect of the work of art on artist and world alike. The work of art and, in this case, the photograph, are the communication of the experience and affect of an image of thought (cf. Laruelle 2011: 119). The poet upon meeting Dylan Thomas notes the following in his diary:

[Dylan] Thomas had been talking for some time. I don’t remember how; I asked him whether there had ever been any occurrence when he described directly something he was seeing, when he imitated the work of the painter who paints from sight – as I once tried in my youth. – No, he said, I can’t do that; I need memory to collaborate with me. We even agreed that it is not a good idea to have view in front of him when writing (Seferis 1986b: 36).

Seferis has already declared his unease about mechanical devices, such as the gramophone. In this passage, Seferis is stating simultaneously his distrust of faithful reproduction as an artistic practice while also intimating that some sort of creative deformation is central to any artistic practice. In a way, Seferis is restaging and making explicit Paul Valéry’s ambivalence evident in the 1939 speech on the centennial of the photograph. Valéry in that speech meditated on the impact of photography on literature by noting the ‘new kind of reagent whose effects have certainly not as yet been explored’ (quoted in Brunet: 80–82). Valéry concluded that there is an unmistakable parallel to be drawn between the advent of photography and that of the ‘descriptive genre’; Valéry thus inferred an epistemic link between the realist novel and the photographic representation of reality (Brunet: 113–14).

Photography as a semi-automatic process demands of the practitioner, in this case Seferis, to surrender control by placing a significant amount of trust in the process and the material itself, more than he ever had done with the written word: ‘… the photograph becomes the model for its receivers’ actions.

of variable sensations’ (Deleuze and Parnet: 39–40).



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They react in a ritual fashion to its message in order to placate of fate circling overhead above the surface of the image’ (Flusser 2000: 62).

The statement by Valéry quoted above, concerning the ‘new kind of reagent whose effects have certainly not as yet been explored’, resonates even more in this instance. Nevertheless, photography becomes a regular activity for Seferis, though not one that he will expand on in his writings. In the whole of his poetic oeuvre, there is only one reference to photography (in the poem ‘In the manner of G.S.’). Mentions of photography are scarce in his diary as well.9 However, it is interesting to note that when Seferis does refer to photography in his diaries, it seems to be along the lines of outlining after a fashion an education of seeing and by extension, a new way of thinking about the gaze. Photography, it seems, serves as a tool for Seferis to explore and develop his poetic practice. It is useful to note the observation Seferis makes in the diary entry dated Monday November 22 1937, titled ‘Memory of Cavafy’. Here Seferis undertakes the investigation of the Cavafy ‘type’ and in the process gives us an idea of the impression Cavafy has made on him (Seferis 1977a: 85ff.) Seferis concludes that it is useful to have ‘honest autobiographical information regarding our own demeanour towards a work, but also of that work’s demeanour towards us’ (Seferis 1977a: 89). Seferis seems to be inferring that this honesty in how one approaches and reacts to a work feeds into one’s own artistic practice. In the same diary entry, the poet also notes that ‘… the school to learn to appreciate works of art are other works of art and nothing else …’ (ibid.). This becomes more evident as time goes by; a 1946 diary entry, written while Seferis was in Poros, reads as follows:

The sun is rising. Last night’s moon still shining very brightly, high up in the sky towards the west. The immobile mobility of these things is such that you think that the boat we are traveling on, at any time, might be toppled over and might deposit you inside the maelstrom, mixed with rocks, wood, colours, boats, much like when a passenger liner is sinking. The need to tighten the aperture, otherwise you can feel yourself slowly fading away (Seferis 1977b: 81).

One cannot help coming away with the feeling that Seferis was more than an amateur photographer: his personal interest in photography was more complex than that. It would not be an exaggeration to state that Seferis’s way of observing and comprehending the world seems to have been gradually moulded by photography. Eleni Papargyriou makes a similar case:

9 Papargyriou collects and collates in her article the explicit references to photography across the seven published volumes of Μέρες. She locates the following references to photography in Seferis’ diary: Mέρες Α΄ (Seferis 1975a: 46), Μέρες B΄ (Seferis 1975b: 87), Mέρες Δ΄ (Seferis 1986a: 132–3, 171, 302), Mέρες Ε΄ (Seferis 1977b: 63), Μέρες ΣΤ΄ (Seferis 1986b: 36, 174).



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Images seem to function as stimuli of thoughts, and to an even greater extent, words. There is a linguistic interference when the onlooker describes a photograph; photographs of people are obviously not the people they depict, but are conventionally recognised as such. Arguably, it is the discourse around the image that establishes this recognition, rather than an intuitive working of the mind itself. In other words, in order to make the image meaningful, the onlooker envelops the content of the photograph with language (Papargyriou 2008: 88).

In an earlier diary entry from 1943, Seferis had admitted that photography sharpened his powers of observation: ‘I felt just like when the camera shutter closes: the impression worked: why this particular one and not another one?’ (1986a: 302). In a way, Seferis is backtracking on a point he had previously made himself: ‘… the painter creates for our sake, as they say, a new eye, the musician creates for our sake new hearing, the poet creates a new (in the wider sense of the word) perception’ (2003a: 155). The function of the work of art is not representational but both experiential and experimental: the work seeks to construct a real that is yet to come (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 142).

It is quite telling that in the 1946 diary entry previously quoted, the poet’s description of the night sky and the luminescent moon evokes the camera lens in a very specific manner: Seferis’s perception of the sky possesses a necessarily fragmentary aspect: ‘the need to tighten the aperture’ extracts these images from the flow of perception. The description of the night scene, a particular way of seeing and perceiving the moon and the night sky, seems to be commenting on the point when one’s conceptual powers reach an impasse. Seferis in a letter written to Maro notes as much on the fragmentary nature of the photographic gaze: ‘The smaller the aperture is, the more detailed is the picture taken. When you say to yourself “that is wonderful”, “that is lovely”, “that is brilliant”, you take pictures with a wide aperture, “flou”’ (Seferis 2000: 12). Seferis’s photographs can be seen as an intimation of the workings of perception rather than simply as images of the world beyond the camera lens.

These photographs are images excised from the flow of perception: an increased control over the act of seeing is suggested. It becomes very much apparent that photography functions for the poet as an enhancing prosthesis to sight; in fact, we could go as far as to suggest that Seferis makes the call for an intensified experience of the simple act of seeing. It is only in this manner that photography stops simply being a medium for transmitting information about the world and becomes a medium for transmitting intensity. Seferis makes a similar point about language in poetry: ‘The work of the poet is to attempt to master the language we give him and to make it speak in the highest possible degree of intensity’ (Seferis 2003b: 173). It appears that if a poet happens to be a great poet, then his work possesses ‘a part of the truth inherent in other eras’ (Seferis 2003a: 130). Seferis implies that if one is an effective artist, then one’s work can open doors to other eras and frames of perception:



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‘[…] after our encounter with an unknown work we become different to who we were before our encounter’ (Seferis 2003: 131). The encounter results in the splitting of the image of the subject; this splitting of the image of the subject emanates from the refraction of the image (cf. Sutton 2009: 159). Various points of view are captured in the image as narration and narrative, as process and product. This splitting of the image of the subject connotes a polychronic temporality which effects a change in one’s perception often implied in Seferis’s work. The resonating coexistence of different temporalities is often encountered in Seferis’s poetry: in the section of the poem ‘Thrush’ entitled ‘Sensual Elpenor’, the poetic subject, upon coming across some remnants of old clothes (one is tempted to see these tattered clothing as discarded images of the self ), experiences this intrusion of different times in his present:

It’s as thoughreturning home from some foreign country you happen to openan old trunk that’s been locked up a long timeand find the tatters of clothes you used to wearon happy occasions, at festivals with many-coloured lights,mirrored, now becoming dim,and all that remains is the perfume of the absenceof a young form (Seferis 1995: 164).

In Seferis’s novel Six Nights on the Acropolis, as Stratis awaits Bilio to return, the narrative seems to be flitting back and forth between times past and times present. The narrative is mapping out how Stratis negotiates his desire for Bilio. Desire, recollection and perception work to dissolve the rigid boundaries between different times:

Stratis had now reached Omega, the final book of the Odyssey. It was getting dark. He stepped outside the door to check the position of the Evening Star. Bilio was due back in two or three hours at most. It was her expressed wish that he not meet her at the boat. The sea was serene, just as it had been the previous Thursday. He recalled that spring day when he waited for her in her house, that first time. He was surprised that his heart was beating just as wildly now as it was then. The same images were straining to enter his consciousness. He went back inside and began to arrange the room just as it had been the day she had left. He walked over to the bed and rumpled the sheets. He laughed, catching himself trying to give the sheets and pillows exactly the same shape her body had imprinted on them right after she had gotten out of her bed. He walked towards the door again. He stopped short, got a glass, filled it half full, and placed it right next to the bed. That’s how it was left after she had taken a drink just before saying goodbye (Seferis 2007: 178).



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Stratis remembers back to the last time Bilio was there and attempts to recreate the room according to the image in his head. He accesses his memory in an attempt to bring the past into the present: motivated by desire, this is an attempt on Stratis’s part to insert an image of the past in the present. In this way, the willed, conscious staging of memory opens the past out into the future. Stratis uses the image stored in his memory as an expression of desire: the past is physically reconstructed in the present, thus becoming part of it. A memory that had been archived as a seminal experience has become tangible once again. Jacques Derrida in Archive Fever notes that the archive is an ‘irreducible experience of the future’ (Derrida 1996: 68).

Figure 8.1 George Seferis, Alona, Cyprus, 1954Source: National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, image 152_1954



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‘minute interstitial space’: photography and new perception

Seferis’s photographic output can be framed within a context of national imagery: in the photograph taken in Cyprus in 1954 (Fig. 8.1), three children are standing against a wall. The oldest one is joyfully looking at the camera while being partially hidden by a cupboard; the other two are looking away from the camera in a very unselfconscious manner. Above the heads of the children, a message scrawled on the wall in capital letters reads ‘Greece is what we desire even if that means eating stones’ and underneath it ‘Whose is it?’ (we assume the question refers to Cyprus). The photograph seems to make material and legible what the lay person of the time thought and desired. The message on the wall can simultaneously be read as both a desperate call for unity and integration but also as a questioning of personal and collective identity. Seferis’s photographic output can also be situated within a context of a modernity rendering perception automatic to a certain degree; in this way, Seferis’s work attempts a punctilious and dexterous recreation of the conditions of sensory perception. The photograph becomes the world as the lens becomes a mechanical prosthesis for the eye. In this manner, the means of perception undergo a silent, subtle revolution (Crary 2001: 13, 68). Seferis as photographer obliquely captures the ‘sublimated precariousness’ of a threatening modernising urban world as a means of formalising the effects of personal and collective fragmentation and psychic upheaval; he achieves this while simultaneously preserving a naturalist surface of the image, to paraphrase Jonathan Crary (2001: 131).

Roland Barthes might have argued that

our entire civilisation has a taste for the reality effect, attested to by the development of specific genres such as the realistic novel, the private diary, documentary literature, the news item, the historical museum, the exhibition of ancient objects, and above all, the massive development of photography, whose sole pertinent feature (in relation to drawing [and I am going to add writing, as well]) is precisely to signify that the event represented has really taken place (Barthes 1986: 139).

However, the photograph in Seferis’s case functions not just as a medium of slavish representation but as an attempt to open an aperture into a different, more precise (but not necessarily more faithful) perception of the world. Seferis himself notes in a relevant passage in his diary for Saturday 18 December 1954: ‘We stopped just below Amshit and watched the sun sink inside the calm sea of Phoenicia. But how it is that someone finally sees things clearly – I mean like when the camera is properly set up’ (Seferis 1986b: 173–4). Seferis had climbed up the Acropolis hill on two consecutive May nights in 1926 and recorded his impressions:



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The line of Hymettus, the purest line I have ever seen; a permanent surprise that this is a line of nature not belonging to art; the interstice here is minute. Erechtheion; the knees of these girls who are neither women nor columns but rather cornerstones; strange, the weight they lift you cannot feel it neither on their heads nor on their neck or their shoulders but on their lifted leg and their chest (Seferis 1977a: 60, original emphasis).

Seferis’s photographic gaze describes in detail the Caryatids in an attempt to retrieve and grasp duration; Seferis in his description attempts to grasp a movement (the lifting of the leg) that has simultaneously already happened

Figure 8.2 George Seferis, Poros shipyard, 1940Source: National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, image 4_1940_15



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and is happening as we speak. Seferis makes visible the infinite bisection of time (Sutton 2009: 93), that is to say, he renders duration perceptible. In this diary entry, Seferis creates a mental snapshot made up of concepts and states of things (Flusser: 35–6). The image of boats ashore taken in Poros 1940 (Fig. 8.2), Venice 1952 (Seferis 2000: 89) and Ile-de-Rouad, Syria 1954 (Seferis 2000: 114) aspire to inscribe on the surface of photographic film the concept and sensation of being cast ashore. For example, one might say that the Poros photograph hints at a fragmentation: the anchor has been separated from the body of the boat. The anchor seems to be the only thing left intact from the entire structure. Taken over a period of 14 years, these three photographs are anchored not only by their contingency but also by the fact that one makes oneself the measure of photographic knowledge (Barthes 1981: 21);10 the considerable effect in these pictures is achieved when the narrative folded therein unfolds into a narrative replacing a memory that was never one’s own in the first place. In these pictures we find ourselves in a field of fantasised presence. The connection between these three pictures is somewhat arbitrary; yet this glimpsed relativity to each other creates an immanent field to which they all belong and this is how the retrieval mechanisms of the unconscious are instrumentalised by the clicking of the camera button.

The human unconscious, the human body unites itself with its surroundings through the camera lens. Seferis had attempted to articulate such feelings in the past:

I know that my entire life is not going to be enough for me to express what I have been trying to say for many days now; this union of nature with a simple human body – this worthless thing or this superhuman thing, as they might say today […]. But in order to say what you want to say you must create another language and to nurture it for years on end with whatever it is you have loved, whatever it is you have lost, with whatever it is you will ever find again (Seferis 1977b: 39–40).

Seferis’s photographs work as a different, perhaps minor, discourse layered in a different manner to linguistic discourse. In these photographs one can discern that it is the same person taking these photographs; however, the narrative strand, if one may be allowed this term here, is one of uncoupling personal memory from photographic memory: memory as stored temporal event is no longer the work of subjective investment, and its inscription becomes automatic (Stewart 2007: 127–8). In short, these pictures work as time-images, relating an implied change in the configuration of the world. Seferis’s photographs indicate a rupture in the experience of conventional temporality. Seferis has alluded to a rupture of this sort in his poetry. In ‘Thrush’, he writes:

10 Cf. ‘My body has taken on desiring as intensely as the head, it has gone crazy. You’d think that it is corrugated like a brain’ (Seferis 1977a: 66).



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whoever has never loved will love,in the light; and you find yourselfin a large house with many windows openrunning from room to room, not knowing from where to look out first,because the pine trees will vanish, and the mirrored mountains, and the chirping of birdsthe sea will empty, shattered glass, from north and southyour eyes will empty of the light of daythe way the cicadas all together suddenly fall silent (Seferis 1995: 170).

The imagery in the extract names the moment when the temporal flow is halted; the experience of regular time is transmogrified into the experience of a moment when these series of images of time are incompossible; that is to say, these images of time are combined and synthesised into a specific manner hitherto unseen (Deleuze 2001: 50). Time-images make time and the experience of time, the experience of being in time, a central narrative device of Seferis’s photographs (cf. Sutton 2010: 311). On their own, these pictures tell one story; when we start discerning themes, then we start reading these images through the signs they articulate. These images are a repository of sheer duration, and we have to drill into the depth of these photographic surfaces to uncover memory. Space subtends in these photographs, but it is ultimately subsumed into the experience of time as time becomes out of joint presenting itself in a pure state (Deleuze 1989: 271). In a 1946 diary entry written by Seferis while he was still on Poros, the photographic gaze inscribes in narrative this sense of a time out of joint:

Impossible to distinguish the light from silence, silence and the light from tranquillity. Once hearing would touch a loud bang, a distant voice, a slight twittering. But all of these were in some way closed off in a different place, like the beating of your heart which you felt once and then forgot about it. The sea had no surface […]. A feeling that there is another facet of life […]. A feeling that if an infinitesimal crack were to open in this closed vision, everything could empty out from the four corners of the horizon and leave you naked and alone, begging for mercy, sputtering senseless words, lacking that incredible precision you were witness to (Seferis 1977b: 67–8, original emphasis).

Seferis’s gaze appropriates photographic modes of framing the image of the world: the world is circumscribed within a narrative where we zoom in and out of focus continuously. As has previously been noted, all of Seferis’s photographs were shot in black and white. One could make the assumption that Seferis might have regarded the black-white-grey values of black and white film as being more immediate than those of colour film: the black-white-grey reproduction of the (coloured) real world represented a hitherto unattainable quality in visual expression (cf. Moholy-Nagy 2003: 93). If we could see the world in black and white, we would see the world as it really is; black and white photographs ‘more



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clearly reveal the actual significance of the photograph, i.e. the world of concepts’ (Flusser 2000: 43).

Seferis might have been also become attracted to black and white film because black and white photography embodies a modernist aesthetic par excellence: we come to recognise photography’s perceptual power retroactively as a disappearing or vanished world. For Seferis, the idea of photography persists as a way of negotiating the transition into a world where time is out of joint, a world where polychronic temporalities persist.

The fragmented life of visual perception (in poetry)

David Rodowick has noted that ‘technological innovation always seems to run ahead of the perceptual and cognitive capacity to manipulate them for our own ends. It is the failure to arrive at what always comes ahead’ (Rodowick 2007: 176). In the poem ‘In the manner of G.S.’, the only one by Seferis to refer explicitly to photography, the subject travels along an impressionistic itinerary traversing Greece in a desperate attempt to establish a pragmatic model for perception and sight. In the poem, the space traversed becomes an effect of matter and movement (Grosz 2001: 118). Seferis in the poem attempts to find how vision is constructed by investigating the, or rather a set of relations between figure and ground, horizon and object.11 The poem seeks to define how we define space and time even when we find ourselves adrift as a result of existential crisis:

to remember (to place oneself in the past), to relocate (to cast oneself elsewhere), is to occupy the whole of time and the whole of space, even admitting that duration and location are always specific, always defined by movement and action (Grosz 2001: 119).

In the poem the subject attempts to find how memory in the first two stanzas gives way to perception:

11 Merleau-Ponty notes that the visible is ‘a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom … in general a visible is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offering all naked to a vision which could only be total or null, but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons, ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world – less a colour or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colours, a momentary crystallization of coloured being or of visibility. Between the alleged colours and visible, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things’ (Merleau-Ponty 1969: 132–3).



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Strange people! they say they’re in Attica but they’re really nowhere;they buy sugared almonds to get marriedthey carry hair tonic, have their photographs takenthe man I saw today sitting against a background of pigeons and flowerslet the hands of the old photographer smoothe away the wrinklesleft on his face by all the birds in the sky (Seferis 1995: 72).

The Real is decomposed into separate contemporaneous images and retinal retention is what puts the fragmented real back together:12

Wherever I travel Greece wounds me,curtains of mountains, archipelagos, naked granite.They call the one ship that sails AG ONIA 937 (ibid).13

Fragmentation of perception is evident even in the perception of the ship’s name; the image, or rather the perception of the image, is fragmentary. Seferis as the roaming subjectivity of the poem not only refers to photography but also appropriates a photographic mode of representation. A paradigm shift is implied in Figs 8.2 and 8.3: the very act of seeing is untethered from being bound to a very specific time and place. Seferis in his photographs comes to question how one sees and perceives the world through the camera lens: what is it that the world makes one feel, see and understand? How is our understanding of the world transformed through photography?

The serial nature of the diary is somewhat akin to photography; the accretion of diary entries and their registering of facts, sensations, recollections and reflections into an autobiographical narrative reminds us to a certain extent of a photographic archive and its mosaic-like structure.14 What secrets regarding the subject are to be recovered will be recovered in an oblique yet active manner. We discover the subject which is not so much divided as refracted through both an autobiographical and a photographic discourse: this fragmentation is a rhetorical gesture, a narrative memory of the subject’s resistance to its own ideas, a map of the subject’s complex interactions with the world.

12 The line from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (‘ὁρῶμεν ἀνθοῦν πέλαγος Αἰγαῖον νεκροῖς’) embedded in the next stanza of the poem also hints at the fragmented proliferation of images (manifest in the form of bodies).

13 Barthes notes: ‘each photograph always contains this imperious sign of my future death’ (1981: 97) and that there is another punctum, ‘no longer of form but of intensity … . Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that has been’), its pure representation’ (1981: 96).

14 ‘The photographic image partakes more of the nature of a mosaic than of a drawing or painting’ (Weston 1985: 142).



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In pictures like the one taken in Tolo in 1938 (Fig. 8.3), we observe the development of the poet’s gaze; we become witness to the poet locating aesthetic reality within the actual world. This task is what gives the world meaning. This sort of perceptual epiphany is particularly apparent in Seferis’s poetry as the poet’s ability to see achieves ‘its most expressive crystallisation’ (Levitt quoted in Sutton 2009: 105). The craggy, rocky formations, the sheerness of the landscape, the way the light falls intimate a non-human reality, a non-human state of affairs. The photographs might feel somewhat busy with the jagged angles of the rocks but they also feel austere, if not downright severe in their composition.

Every photographic experience is an experience of what is no longer there. Susan Sontag exclaims: ‘You are not there in a picture, and that is where some of

Figure 8.3 George Seferis, Tolo, 1938Source: National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, image B_4_10



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the anxiety comes in; there is nothing you can do when you look at a photograph’ (Sontag 2003: 64). Every photograph is an act that captures time by cribbing it from its flow: photography is a process through which the natural flow of time is pilfered. It is the ability of the photograph to invent, as Barthes tells us, a counter-memory.15 This in turn opens up the question of temporality, as we enter the temporal flow of each image;16 every photographic image appears as an uncompromising flat mirror seemingly bending and twisting around us, creating a membrane trapping us in the unfolding moment captured in it (Sutton 2009: 62).17 Much as the diary is the form given to the trace of existence, that is to say the very stylisation of existence, the photograph is the capture of a moment in time using mechanical apparatuses. Where an accretion of diary entries composes an authorial subjectivity, an accretion of photographs creates an oblique yet immanent trajectory of the perception, and by extension the subjectivity, of the photographer as mediated by mechanical means. By writing every day, the text produces a subjectivity; by taking photographs on a regular basis as Seferis did, one witnesses how one sees the world, oneself and the relation between oneself and the world through the use of the photographic camera. It is in this way that the world undergoes a transfiguration through art.18 Photography functions as a tracing of the image of the world that begins by ‘selecting or isolating, by artificial means such as colorations or other restrictive procedures, what it intends to reproduce’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 11). For Seferis photography creates a (virtual) space wherein the invention, reflection and refraction of subjectivity is coded through the exchange of actual and virtual identities (Sutton 2009: 136). We have been trained to read Seferis’s photographs either through our knowledge of the poems or our knowledge of the diaries and letters, but when we look at pictures like the ones taken early on in Seferis’s photographic activity, the Seurat-like, granular surfaces of the photographs invent their own abstractions, their own organization of the picture plane (Fig. 8.4). The faces in these granular pictures become landscapes of narratives and history themselves (cf. Sutton 2009: 176).

15 ‘Not only is the photograph never, in essence, a memory … but it actually blocks memory, quickly becoming counter-memory’ (Barthes 1981: 91).

16 Poet and photographer Andreas Embirikos noted on this, in his poem ‘Shutter’ [1960]: ‘And now that the shutter has opened and closed like an impartial eye and time has been captured, reflection augments life itself and gives every image the movement and flexibility that drags its most occluded meaning warm from the depths of its (very own) source. And this is how the shutter completely transforms the image; from a static moment (that might as well be bolted) the shutter transforms the image into a varied, graceful dance of hours and plastic bodies, into the tangible, fluttering materialisation of all visions and all desires ’ (Embirikos 2002: 29).

17 Barthes notes that ‘with the photograph we enter into flat death’ (1981: 92).18 Deleuze succinctly deals with the significance of art in everyday life: ‘There is no other aesthetic

problem than that of the insertion of art into everyday life’ (1994: 293). Guattari supplements Deleuze’s statement by noting that ‘Art must insert itself into a social network to celebrate the Universe of art as such … . [these sublime sensations act micro-politically by] rupturing with forms and significations circulating trivially in the social field’ (1995: 130–31).



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Photographs taken during the course of Seferis’s diplomatic career serve not only as mementos of a tempestuous time but also map the endurance of the human subject in the passage of time. The endurance of the human subject in time is a central narrative (and ethical) concern of Seferis, evident in all of his writing. One only needs to remember poems like the sixteenth in the poetic sequence Mythistorema and its depiction of a persecuted Orestes, or certain diary entries. A characteristic passage from the diaries is the following: ‘But it is something heavier to store inside your guts the sudden extermination of a lively world with its light, its shadows, its ceremonies of happiness and sorrow, its dense net of life […]. In this theatre a tragedy without end was staged for it was never allowed its cathartic ending’ (Seferis 1977b: 224). In photography, the theme of the endurance of the subject in time manifests, in all the minute details that no one has really noticed, the details that give life and perception of life depth and substance. Seferis himself noted as much:

I should preliminarily make a general observation: since I travel it so happens that I am witness to things my reader has not seen, things I copy, things I could venture as far as saying that I photograph; I think they are easy to comprehend; I do not expand them out of a sheer dislike for waffling and this is wherein my ‘sin’ lies (Seferis 1991, quoted in Papargyriou 2008: 100).

Figure 8.4 George Seferis, London, 1924Source: National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, image A_43



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Photography thus functions as a narrative prosthesis simultaneously reinstating an omitted narrative while taking the place of narrative. It is as if these photographs act as spectres of what should have been observed but has not been; spectres of stories in the margin.

Seferis’s photographs, in conclusion, function as contracted narratives where the photographer will have to wrestle with probably what is the most significant aesthetic problem: ‘the insertion of art into everyday life’ (Deleuze 1994: 171). In certain photographs, the poet discovers art in everyday life: he captures movement, emotion and individual experience of multiple temporalities all in the same picture (Fig. 8.5). He takes a picture tracing fleeting time and stagnant time in different

Figure 8.5 George Seferis, Korytsa, 1937Source: National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation, image A_6_4



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manifestations within the same image. The multiplicity of human experience in pictures like these is marked by the different velocities of the elements making up the picture.

Subjectivity in Seferis’s poetry, diary and photographs appears to be a composite substance, an aggregate of vital forces, habits and polychronic temporalities. The self is not a determining principle itself; rather, it is determined by the convergence of series of other subjectivities captured on film, other composite substances generated by the very act of photography. Photography, as used by Seferis, encodes the creation of subjectivity and creation of a work of art; these burst forth from the folding in of inner and outer world as the relation between them comes into being. Concepts of identity and self are not only captured in Seferis’s photography but also contested and transformed when the forces to affect and to be affected contained therein push both photographer and viewer into meditating on the encounters which increase one’s capacity to act in and interact with the world. It is in this sense that photography for Seferis acts as an index and narrative of his history to affect and be affected.

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Archaeology of refraction: temporality and subject in George Seferis’ photographs

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