Bob and Marina Black: Faces - Hours

Bob and Marina Black are photographers who currently live in Toronto, though they have spent most of their lives restlessly wandering around the world. They are married and have a son, Dima. The three of them can occasionally be found driving go-karts, sitting by large bodies of water drinking up wet air or bicycling-walking through city neighbourhoods dreaming of blooming gardens and cheap wine.

Photographs 1-15: Bob Black, from the series, FACES.

FACES: Faces gather time along their edges, sprockets of light pitched around thumb-bowed shadow, the way milk rims the lip and bottom-dip of a glass, the way bone sedimentizes sentiment pitched from the age and voice of the earth, the way glass and stone color from exposure. We speak of time, we speak of faces, we seldom speak of how these cauterizes and coalesces into some odd unknowing. How is it that we distinguish one face from all the others? How is it that we speak of others and ourselves through an algebra of memory, speak of the faces that we have seen or known distinguished into certainty. What else is there in our knowing, at the heart of the well of our remembrance? How is it that we can ever photograph a face, for is it not the deceit (we believe we know another and ourselves by passing through the threshold of the face) that engines our operative waking? Is it not the very illusion under which we, photographers and non-photographers alike, negotiate and arrive each day we awaken and categorize neatly the arrangement of those surrounding us? How else, initially (and over recollected time) do we begin to work out an understanding of someone, let alone ourselves, then by quickly drinking up the constellation of meaning and unmeaning of a face. Recall someone: face or action, which do you see initially? Can a person's behaviour and character and life remain faceless? To the contrary, can we not picture and construct a face without action? Then what about the blind, what is etched upon their skull and lithe memorial imagery? You should know I am blind in one eye and struggled as a child with un-seeing. At at early age, and often to my horror, i learned that each face is navigable but not attainable. In fact, I have spent the better part of my life trying to decipher what it is that I see when I look into the mirror: how is it that this chimera, this insolvable jigsaw is possibly me. When I became a photographer this became an ethical question: if I could not understand this revenant shell as me (my face yes, but surely not the "I" that is "me."), how then to photograph someone else, let alone their face? I have not yet solved this quandary. For several years now, I have been working on a long project about faces, a personal journey apart from my other work in pursuit of that reconciliation. The project is embarrassingly Narcissistic. You should know the truth about this project. Every other project I work on, every roll of film that I expose, involves taking a few photographs of the subject faces, stripped of their context, their environment, stripped of all the surrounding earth-gravel and light-dust that we normally associate with photography, even at the risk of subverting the intent of the original projection I am working on. I often (only after people are comfortable) take a few extreme, close-up photographs, trying to get as close to people as I can, as if digging into a mirror. Soon, the disorienting calculus sets in: closeness, infinitely halved. Long exposures, focused, out-of-focus, short exposures, variable depths of field, all jostling in an effort to see how much can be removed in order to still retain the face of the "I' or the "You." And, I should add that I always photograph myself at least once each time before I unspool the film from camera and often for the last frame. It is a diary of failure: how far away, how licked-over-distance in the print of a smudge of space: breath between a barracks of lens and light. These 15 photographs are a water-drop nub from this series, which is hopelessly large and seemingly endless. On good days, I think it's the rhyme around which the rest of my photography and projects revolve and are resolved. On poor days, I feel that again I have failed to understand or properly photograph those faces around me. Failure is nothing new to any of us, and that principle is the nexus around which these simple images should be fingered. In some sense, they are different from most of my work: less and more. I continue to photograph even when I have not yet understood how to begin. Bereft. Beating. Brook. Fall upon me.

Photographs 16-30: Marina Black: from the series, HOURS