Adventures in Advenience: The Return of a Photographic Moment
on Richard Johnson (India), 12/Jan/2012 14:18, 34 days ago
Nine years ago this month I dropped anchor in Tunisia for a six-month contract teaching English at a school in the seaside city ofSousse, packing along with me little besides my old Canon single lens reflex, an 18mm wide-angle lens and a few dozen rolls of Ilford FP4.I worked six days a week, so when that seventh day came round I was on a bus or a train somewhere into countryside as far as I could get. But it wasn't till shortly before my departure that I was able to devote an entire week to a voyage into the Sahara, at least to its border towns and not-too-distant oases.It was a hermetic experience: late May in the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, theChott el-Djeridsalt flats, and beyond them the Sahara -- with their mirages, siestas, scorpions and utter lack of tourists -- is conducive to isolation and meditation, and I found myself subsisting on a diet of bread, water, the kindness of strangers and contemplations of photography.Two years later, after a fleetingphoto exhibition, I was commissioned by my alumni magazine towrite a reflectionof my own alongside some of those photographs of Tunisia. At that time I happened to be reading a gifted copy of Camera Lucida, a reflection on photography by the French philosopher Roland Barthes.For the magazine I penned a brief, recollected imagining of my experience behind the lens in the Tunisian desert, and in it I recalled my introduction to Barthes' concept ofadvenience, a term he employed to summarize his personal experience -- physical and emotional -- of encountering certain moving photographs.In my reflection on reading Barthes and photographing Tunisia as a foreigner in a studious, contemplative mood, I was inspired in a moment to define advenience as "the adventuresome adding of a new perspective to the whole" and thereby tie the experience of the photographer to that of the hypothetical viewer in a loose continuum of photographic intimacy.The magazinepublished the piece, I dutifully added it to my CV, and that seemed to wrap up tidily the Tunisia chapter of my life (aside from my lasting support for thecountry'sandSousse'ssoccer teams).That is, until about a month ago, when I received a phone call in the middle of a busy Friday afternoon from a certain Sarah in Kansas City. She was excited. There was something about a college, an exhibit and some students, but before I knew exactly what was hurtling through the receiver, I heard her reciting back to me my long tucked-away definition of advenience.As it happened, the photography students at theKansas City Art Institutewere about to debut that very evening an exhibition calledadvenience (or, an adventursome adding of a new perspective to the whole).Photograph courtesy Sarah Taylor, Kansas City Art InstituteThe phone call was equal parts courtesy, flattery and (possibly) last-minute due diligence for my acknowledgement.Its effect, however, was to re-awaken me to the ecology of inspiration: if a handful of photography students can unite a particular collective photographic experience behind agoogle searchresult of an obscure academicky term that years ago I employed to interpret the momentary euphoria of clicking the shutter in a certain place and time, then perhaps we can interpret inspiration as a kind of aperture that opens up between an individual and his or her world; the sudden entrance of light onto dark, a new perspective on the whole.The adventure continues.