A Moment in Time, but not a Static Image
For The Jewish Photographer an ideal expressed by Ya’akov Agam, namely, Jewish Art including photographs that are dynamic and not static, is a challenge and an opportunity.
Agam contrasts dynamic with static being a proponent of the kinetic and visual. His artistic realm has been in the task of making us see! From my perspective Ya’akov Agam is the visual rabbi and the prophet of hebraic consciousness, and we will be visiting his efforts later in this book.
Fearing the static approach to jewish life under the burden of Halacha, literally walking the Jewish legal system, Judaism invented Midrash. The evolving process of appealing to the human imagination became that which kept the jewish people as a dynamic heritage.
Davar Acher
It is not always clear to me which comes first in dealing with my photos: Did I come across an image and the Jewish references came as a response? Or Did I come across a Jewish reference and searched or remembered an appropriate image? In either event, the image below is a photograph from a trip through Brazil.
The photograph depicts a natural phenomena described on Wikopedia: “The Meeting of Waters (Portuguese: Encontro das Águas) is the confluence between the dark (blackwater) Rio Negro and the pale sandy-colored (whitewater) Amazon River, referred to as the Solimões River in Brazil upriver of this confluence. For 6 km (3.7 mi) the waters of the two rivers run side by side without mixing.”
When I came across this image of the “Meeting of Waters” the fluid tension brought to mind the living tensions that are part of Jewish teachings. Along with the two amazons, these tensions reflect a dynamic life state rather than a static death like state:
| The tension between the Inclinations, good and the evil | The dynamic tension between fixed (Keva) vs the spontaneous intention (Kavana). | The sacred (Kodesh) and profane (Hol) |
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| The Hebrew for inclination is Yetzer with Yetzer Tov being the inclination to do good positive acts, and a respect for Yetzer HaRa, “the ”evil” inclination. | As in prayer as in life, it is the fixed (Keva) that provides continuity, and the (Kavana) spontaneous that adds jest to our lives. | The (Kodesh) Sabbath reflects” a state of being” that is special and distinct from the other six days of the week. (Hol) Profane is ordinary, perhaps even necessary. |
I seem to recall that I did come across this “meeting of the waters” image in my files and thought of my early discovery that Judaism teaches LeChayim- Life as the state of tension between opposites, then later combined the Midrash and the image into visual below:
In the practice of The Jewish Photographer we might separate out the static and the dynamic, the sacred and the profane in distinguishing between the snapshot or selfie from the photograph that captures the moment. We might well take a photograph just to serve as a reminder of a site visited, a photograph of a museum artifact to study at a later date, and certainly there would inevitably be images that can not be salvaged in Photoshop or any other software. We might call all these profane, while that special image would be sacred, worthy of Alexenberg’s words: “Open your eyes in wonder everyplace. With eyes of wonder you can discover the miraculous in the mundane.”