Keegan Holden – Encounters, impressions

Sort of Like an Accordion
OK, so, I’m going to set up this box here, it’s flexible, like an accordion, kind of. I’ll put the accordion thing on top of this tripod, like the thing they use for surveying. It’ll hold up the box and I will look into the back of it…it’s made of glass in back. I’ll disappear under a dark cloth back there so you won’t see me, but I’ll be able to see you. Yes, like a magic trick.

You’ll actually be upside down when I see you on the glass, but I won’t really see you that way because my brain naturally flips you back around, and you won’t, of course, feel upside down, although who can really say which way is up in the universe, am I right? I’m going to ask you to hold still. The best way I can say it is, “Don’t move your feet.” If you don’t move your feet, the rest of you can pivot around, but you’ll stay the same distance away from me, and that’s important because while I’m looking at your image upside down projected on that glass (Yes, right, it’s like a movie projector basically) I’m going to twiddle these brass knobs and it will make the image come into focus, sharper looking, like when you squint a bit. Being in focus is kind of like waking up in the morning. Do you dream? You’re in some beautiful lyrical dream and then you catch a bit of light behind the curtains and the dream sparkles away and you’re not tugged down by the gravity of the day yet until you open all the way, sit up and say, OK. No, no, you won’t feel it when I have you in focus, either. You’ll just be standing there, not moving your feet. It’ll feel the same after I’ve focused.

Then I’m going to come out from the dark sheet, and I’m going to pick up one of these film holders. Yes exactly, like when you get an x-ray, but instead of putting your broken wrist directly on the film holder, I’ll slip it into the camera. Not your wrist, the film holder. And I’ll pull out this dark slide and there is film inside—yes, it’s a sheet of plastic with light senstive silver on it—it’s a long story. Now the film is in the camera, and when I click the shutter here, at the end of this long cable, it’ll take a little squib of light with your image in it, and pass it onto the film, forever. Sort of. There’s the whole dark room part of the…What are you supposed to do? Good question. You’re supposed to just stand there and be yourself. I know it’s a weird thing to ask someone to do, especially with this huge accordion machine pointed at you. You have to watch Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old. It’s a film of footage from World War I that he’s colorized and slowed down and added sound to, so it’s not all herky jerky. But you get to observe a whole bunch of people, kids, really, a lot of them with cool mustaches, watching a movie camera for the first time in their lives. They are marching through the middle of shit-infested hell and they see this camera come over the rise, and they look at it like it’s two headed goat or a Viking ship that’s just pulled up on a beach. No…no one has asked them to just be themselves. You’re right, the occasion of getting their picture taken is a freaking ticket out of being themselves. This is going to sound a little strange, but I don’t think you are you. I know I’m not me most of the time. Or, I’m not one thing. Remember how we talked about being asleep and being awake? Well both the asleep one of you, lying there not fighting gravity, with no sense of even having a body, just drooling and imagining you’re in a hot air balloon with your grandfather, is the same you as the one struggling to stand up into the break of day, and the same one who has had a cup of strong coffee and is ready to write an essay about something you care about. But nothing about those ones feels alike, right? It’s a ridiculous thing to say that you are the same person right now as you were five minutes ago, much less five years ago.

In a way, the picture I make will prove this. You’ll see some things in the picture that look familiar, and others that don’t. You’ll have your features, your clothes on. You might remember the story of this afternoon when we met, with you on your way home from the market with bags of chicory and onions. But that tilt of your hips, the particular sketch of your cheekbones in this late light, might look strange and even offputting.

You know what it’s like when you see someone after a long time, say an old friend from school or the military; and for a few seconds you can’t believe it’s them—how old they look? But then, your brain completely re-writes the image of them in your mind, and that becomes what they look like. It becomes them. Well my camera is going to make a permanent record of that first, unfamiliar impression. It’ll be like a statue arrived in your driveway of you in some moment in time and space, made from one particular vantage point, and it may look unfamiliar. But it’s you, as much as anything is you. There was a painter named Lorenzo Lotto, he was from nearby here, just up the A13 in Venice. He is one of my favorite portrait painters of all time. He painted amazing narrative and bible scenes, infuenced by Durer and Messina, but his portraits are magically incisive and deep. You know when you walk into a museum and there are rooms with dozens of paintings of old white people and at first they all look alike, just bust after bust of 3/4 views of guys in velvet staring straight at you? And then one of them will just sing out, like this person you can’t connect to and know nothing about is projecting out into the room, feeling realer and realer? That’s what Lorenzo Lottos are like. He had this way of just finding these slices of complicated humanity in people and easing them out onto canvas, like a diner waitress with a piece of hot strawberry pie. But lots of people didn’t like them. He wasn’t successful in his lifetime, moved around a lot, and was described as being a melancholy loner.

Tommaso Costanzo hired Lotto to paint him in armor with all his weapons. Apparently the results were magnificent (the picture is lost), but Costanzo rejected it because he didn’t think it looked like him. That seems unlikely. Lotto, influenced by the Germans, was devoted to painting what he saw, unlike Titian who smoothed and idealized. Having Lorenzo Lotto paint you would be like having Billy Strayhorn write a song about you: rich, moody, delirious. The song might not define you—you couldn’t use it at the Social Security office to pick up your benefit check—but you’d be grateful it existed, you’d be happy someone had seen it in you.

I’m not comparing myself to Lorenzo Lotto. But while we were talking about him, I took the picture. You reached a second elbow up onto that bench, while your hands dangled unevenly. Your dress shirt opened a little and I could see a mole on your chest as your belly strained aginst your belt. I could feel you arching your back, trying to get comfortable. And for 1/ 60th of a second, you appeared to look inside yourself. Maybe you were imagining walking through the Uffizi or the Pincoteca in Ravenna or that time you travelled to Rome and saw the amazing Lotto portrait of a man at the Museo Doria Pamphilj. He’s touching his heart and side like he’s trying to make sure he’s still there. His mouth is a little open and you can feel the inbreath, the life in him. His hands are supple but imperfect, like all hands. We don’t know who he was. But we know he was, and is, very much alive.

Tim Davis [ Tivoli, ny 2021]

A portrait photographer

To be a portrait photographer you have to be someone who likes to share your excitement about what you do with other people. When you are a photographer willing to take portraits, you walk down the street with an expanded curiosity towards humanity. You look at people like a honeybee searching for the nectar of a flower. And you are really hungry and very anxious to find the first person who will break the ice that separates you
from the rest of the world.
Looking for people to photograph could be one of the biggest challenges for a photographer: you can’t leave the house irritated, agitated and cursing the whole world if you need to create a relationship with a complete stranger on any given day. Or maybe yes. However, that specific mood at some point will emerge on the surface of the picture. A portrait is many things but, first of all, it is a shared moment between two human beings.
This book presents a selection of portraits that Keegan Holden made between Lugo and Faenza, Italy, in the summer of 2019. The photographer spontaneously chose which person, look or situation he found interesting or inspiring, most of the time approaching unknown people randomly met on the streets in a broken Italian, with the nerve of the outsider, aided by his strange ability to attract people like flypaper. The portraits show us individuals or small groups of people, in natural light and often at a close distance. Despite the serial approach, the photographs are inconspicuously staged, and by looking at them as a body of work it emerges as a clearly individual signature.
The photographs were made with a large-format 4×5 analog camera, which every time, like a small ritual, he mounted and disassembled in the urban landscape. Paradoxically, bulky photographic equipment makes the photographer more vulnerable, at times it can even make him seem clumsy, and this shortens the psychological distance and makes the “meeting” between the photographer and the photographed one that takes place on more equal terms.
The operation of approaching a stranger to take their portrait, using this type of view camera on a tripod, with the photographer’s head under the black cloth, is very similar to that of a magician choosing a volunteer at random from the audience to make a magic on stage, choosing them at random from the audience. Or is it maybe just a trick, and the magician and the volunteer had agreed earlier? Photography alone cannot fully reveal the nature of the relationship between the photographer and the photographed. However, it is able to show us a number of other small but important truths, and the framing of the photograph on page 48 (La Verità meaning ‘The Truth’) shows us that Keegan Holden is well aware of this, and that his Italian is more than enough to make good portraits in a foreign land.

Francesco Neri, Luca Nostri