Final Analysis
Roger Hicks considers… Photographic relief: ‘Law and Order’, 2017, by Marc Erwin Babej
‘ Trying to work out the symbols is an enjoyable part of the game’
Let’s start with the photographer’s own words: ‘Rather than impose boundaries between images, symbols and text, it integrates the three. The resulting ImageSymbolText bridges gaps between images and words and reaches beyond combinations of images and words.’ Is this anything more than pretentious drivel? It’s certainly easy to dismiss it as such, until you start thinking. Then you realise that it goes to the very heart of what photography is about. We find ourselves in the realms of semiotics, again easy to dismiss because it veers between statements of the painfully obvious and the rather more difficult question of what makes things painfully obvious.
The photographic images on which the pictures are based are clearly manipulated, composited and mixed with graphics. This does not stop them being photographs. I have little patience with those who say, ‘I’m not a photographer: I’m an artist who uses photography.’ Does it matter? I’ll be the judge of whether or not I think you’re an artist – you don’t need to tell me – but if you take (or set up) photographs, you’re a photographer.
Reading the symbols
It is hard for me to tell how closely these pictures follow Ancient Egyptian symbolism and iconography, simply because I don’t know enough about Ancient Egypt. The ‘controls’ image may be an origin of the hieroglyph was (power/dominion); the dot-andcircle symbol is certainly the hieroglyph for time. Trying to work out the symbols is (an enjoyable) part of the game.
The apparent fidelity with which Babej reproduces the poses of Ancient Egyptian paintings and reliefs is intriguing, and the closer you look, the cleverer it gets, but the interpretation is recursive, which is to say, what we think we understand or see reinforces what we actually understand or see. Our ‘understanding’ does not necessarily relate to reality. Ozymandias, King of Kings, better known as Ramesses II, commissioned accounts of his ‘victory’ at Kadesh in 1274 BCE, which suggests that he was no stranger to ‘fake news’. The purpose of ‘fake news’, after all, is twofold: to tell people what they want to hear, and to reinforce the reputation of the leader who controls the news. Babej claims that enormous scholarly research lies behind his work, and I would be surprised if he were not telling the truth, but how different is the end result from ‘pressing people’s buttons’? You can decide for yourself with the help of the book ( Yesterday – Tomorrow, published by Kehrer Verlag) in which this appears with many other examples of what Babej calls Aspective Realism.