My upside down moment

'Falling Bird' by Ori Gersht in:'The Hidden Land' at Nettie Horn

Ori Gersht: Falling Bird series
Untitled No.5, 2008

Ori Gersht (of the exploding vase) is again deconstructing still life. Part of the current group show 'The Hidden Land' at Nettie Horn, Gersht's series 'Falling Bird' shows a pheasant falling head first into a dark, mirror-like liquid. We see the bird partly submerged: the head is already below the surface. We cannot see the world into which the bird is plunging; to our eye, the animal is duplicated at the point of transition, travelling, crashing, toward itself.

The notes mention the work's reference to a Chardin still life; we may assume that Chardin's painting shows a dead pheasant, customarily hung upside down. Gersht's bird is also upside down, but has come loose, though its new-found freedom - in this world at least - lasts only for the blink of an eye. We may speculate on whether it is already dead; what seems clear is that we are witnessing its journey into the next world.

The show's title 'The Hidden World' is referenced not only in the unknown space below the mirrored surface, but also in the 'unseeable' moment as revealed by high-speed camera: the moment of transition, of death. The link between photographs and mortality - 'frozen' moments, always in the past, always forever - is well documented. A still life, or nature mort, as the French call it, points to the universe via modest objects, everyday scenes. Other images in the series show the surface disturbed by the plunge, and the calm before (or after), from a wider angle: it may be the sea, or a 'metaphysical space'.

It is as if Gersht wants to show us this metaphysical space, or its juncture point, with the camera as his forensic instrument. I find this work profound and very satisfying.

The Hidden Land continues at Nettie Horn until the 21st of June and also features work by Gwenal Belanger, Daniel Firman and Lori Hersberger.

Falling Bodies

My own work for a change - this one is in progress. For a year I have been obsessively photographing people in freefall, in the studio. For most of that year, everyone seemed to think I was mad, but it never seemed impossible, just difficult - I used to worked in a circus where we would get up to much worse.

I don't want to explain in detail how it was done, just that the falls were 'proper' (some from more than 5 metre height); it was important to me that they were 'real' in the sense that real height had to be involved. I took the images on large-format film, never more then one per fall. This introduced a necessary element of chance into an otherwise very controlled situation.

It took some time to get it right: some of the images of 'normal' people (see the woman in orange) don't read so much as a fall - more like a hover. In the end I collaborated with a group of acrobats. I explained to them that I wanted their bodies to flail, explode with movement, to look crushed by gravity; so they improvised moves for the camera, some of them very challenging. The images yielded from that session look much more like falling.

I feel that this throws up some interesting questions about the real and the fake. I feel that, through a series of elaborations, I have arrived at a different kind of ‘real’.

Please come and see this work at my degree show on 9-14 June 09 at LondonMet in Whitechapel, for further details please go my website at http://www.annettehabel.com

Yves Klein

Perhaps the best-known image of a fall, at least in the artworld, Yves Klein's 'Leap into the Void' from 1960. Although Klein fell into a tarpaulin, it must have been scary as hell, falling forward like that, and tarpaulin or not, the fall was real, crystallising a set of ideas in a physical act.

According to the write-up on the Centre Pompidou website, Klein was 'impregnating himself with the immaterial qualities of the void, so that he could transmit them to his artworks.' There is something so quixotic about this, in this sense similar to Kittinger, Bas Jan Ader, even Chaplin or Keaton. Everytime I see the image I oscillate between a sense of awe and wanting to laugh.

Ordinary People

From The Times front page earlier this year, during the season of extremely high winds. What is it about falling, flying, being in mid-air that fascinates us so much?

There is a link between falling and mortality: angels and gods can fly and hover, but us mortals are slowly falling to our deaths. The hope is that somehow we will never hit the ground. Photography freezes a moment in time and creates an image of immortality. We all can hover.


Even worse than falling is being thrown, even if it is for the best.
(Metro front page, 5th of Feb this year.)

Susan Derges

Drops, tears, falling, rising, suspense.

I love the way in which every drop contains a tiny representation of this woman's face. Susan Derges used a machine utilising the properties of light, sound and gravity to create these drops, making visible he laws of physics.