Time and Memory in Roberto Toja's Images
Posted on December 04 2017
Author Giovanna Gammarota
Translated by Jennifer Cooper
.
.
What is the flowing of time? In the reunited Berlin, almost thirty years after the fall of the wall, what attracts the visitor is not the western part whose commercial aspect makes it homologated to other European metropolises. What fascinates the visitor is that the eastern part has been immersed in an immobile atmosphere from which a story emerges, a story that has touched many and still carries the signs of the Cold War and Soviet domination.
Today, this part of the city is unmistakably the distinctive sign of Berlin. It represents the revenge of a place that has long been confined behind a cultural and political wall as well as a physical one. Those who visit Berlin today are fascinated by the east side, demonstrating how memory is a persistent element able to awaken the desire to be a witness of what has happened.
This is what prompted Roberto Toja to travel to Berlin, which very clear from the photographs collected in the book Warum die Zeit? (MFD Editions, 2017). Not the simple desire to provide documentary evidence with a reportage of the actuality of life, certainly more complex after that 9th of November, 1989. Not even to portray daily scenes in a place that alludes to an iconic state. The real motivation that has led the author to go there is just wanting to be a witness of that collective memory, of that "flowing time" that each one of us wants to live fully. "I have in mind - using the author's words - a [ideal?] model City, and I want to find it within the time where I can say I have been there."
Time, the conditioning element par excellence when we are observing. They say that the photographic shot can stop it. However, time is independent and we can clearly see it in these images where it appears metaphysical but also concrete, firm and yet moving. It is as if it dictates a proper rhythm of its own existence by forcing the author to follow its lead. The sequence of photographs that we are suggesting begins with the classic horizontal framing where trittic alternate and seem to show parallel worlds in which something happens simultaneously.
Today, this part of the city is unmistakably the distinctive sign of Berlin. It represents the revenge of a place that has long been confined behind a cultural and political wall as well as a physical one. Those who visit Berlin today are fascinated by the east side, demonstrating how memory is a persistent element able to awaken the desire to be a witness of what has happened.
This is what prompted Roberto Toja to travel to Berlin, which very clear from the photographs collected in the book Warum die Zeit? (MFD Editions, 2017). Not the simple desire to provide documentary evidence with a reportage of the actuality of life, certainly more complex after that 9th of November, 1989. Not even to portray daily scenes in a place that alludes to an iconic state. The real motivation that has led the author to go there is just wanting to be a witness of that collective memory, of that "flowing time" that each one of us wants to live fully. "I have in mind - using the author's words - a [ideal?] model City, and I want to find it within the time where I can say I have been there."
Time, the conditioning element par excellence when we are observing. They say that the photographic shot can stop it. However, time is independent and we can clearly see it in these images where it appears metaphysical but also concrete, firm and yet moving. It is as if it dictates a proper rhythm of its own existence by forcing the author to follow its lead. The sequence of photographs that we are suggesting begins with the classic horizontal framing where trittic alternate and seem to show parallel worlds in which something happens simultaneously.
.
.
Warum Die Ziet? Series. Roberto Toja, Berlin 2009
.
Warum Die Ziet? Series. Roberto Toja, Berlin 2009
.
.
Narrow, long, the scrolling of the film is almost perceptible. The photographs follow one another, creating that movement that materializes time. These alternations create a kind of intermittency that destabilizes the perceived sense of linearity.
The images are formed independently. While the gaze focuses on something, through a network of thoughts, the form is created. This form will truly reveal itself to the gaze only after you have looked at the printed photograph. For this reason, the image leaves its author at the very moment in which it is shot to begin living its own life, which will allow it to be interpreted by each observer in a personal way.
The "time living" in Berlin is clearly visible in his work, a representation hard to achieve because time is an indefinable matter. We are dealing with the memory of a man, a city, a country, a collective feeling that memory itself triggers in those who observe it. Those who have watched the Heimat trilogy directed by Edgard Reitz - an extraordinary film that condenses Big and Small History, aesthetics as a doctrine of sensitive knowledge and belonging to a place not only as a place of birth but as a territory of itself (penetrated by the presence of the individual and his soul) - may perhaps understand what I am talking about. Roberto Toja's photographs are, in their way, a bit of all this as a result of the disposition of the author's mind towards the subject he is portraying, which has to do with listening to the place itself and its memory.
The images are formed independently. While the gaze focuses on something, through a network of thoughts, the form is created. This form will truly reveal itself to the gaze only after you have looked at the printed photograph. For this reason, the image leaves its author at the very moment in which it is shot to begin living its own life, which will allow it to be interpreted by each observer in a personal way.
The "time living" in Berlin is clearly visible in his work, a representation hard to achieve because time is an indefinable matter. We are dealing with the memory of a man, a city, a country, a collective feeling that memory itself triggers in those who observe it. Those who have watched the Heimat trilogy directed by Edgard Reitz - an extraordinary film that condenses Big and Small History, aesthetics as a doctrine of sensitive knowledge and belonging to a place not only as a place of birth but as a territory of itself (penetrated by the presence of the individual and his soul) - may perhaps understand what I am talking about. Roberto Toja's photographs are, in their way, a bit of all this as a result of the disposition of the author's mind towards the subject he is portraying, which has to do with listening to the place itself and its memory.
In a scene from the movie Smoke, director Wayne Wang, Auggie, the protagonist who is a tobacconist, shows to his writer friend several albums where hundreds of photographs have been pasted and that he had been shooting for several years at the same time, always at the same place, always with the same frame. Yet in that same frame, a lot of things happen. "They're all the same," says his friend. Turning album sheets fast. Auggie observes, "You will never understand unless you go slower. You know how it is: [...] time keeps its rhythm. " The miracle occurs when the writer sees a picture in which beyond Auggie's lens, at 8 o'clock in the morning, he recognizes his wife Ellen who had recently died. And here the memory breaks into time and what seems to be any place suddenly becomes "someting else".
.
.
Warum Die Ziet? Series. Roberto Toja, Berlin 2009
.
Warum Die Ziet? Series. Roberto Toja, Berlin 2009
.
.
What happens when we look at Roberto Toja's images is precisely the coming to light of a memory which he is the first who intends to find and meet in his own time but that, as we are observing it, it also becomes our time, in a sort of feeling of communion.
What happens when we look at Roberto Toja's images is precisely the coming to light of a memory which he is the first who intends to find and meet in his own time but that, as we are observing it, it also becomes our time, in a sort of feeling of communion.
Therefore, photos get completed by themselves. There is an interaction between the subject and the photographer, a dialogue that leads to a representation within which each participant lives his part. The making of images is the result of a relationship. It is not uncommon to hear authors claim that they have not realized some details until they have seen the printed versions of the photographs, the subject interacts with the photographer determining a reaction. Without this relationship, the image simply does not exist and cannot give rise to any emotion in the person who is looking at it. Another cinematic example that can lead us to understand what we are talking about is the famous scene of Michelangelo Antonioni's in the movie Blow-up in which the protagonist of the story takes a photograph of two lovers in a park, but only after having printed it, he realizes that he had caught something strange at the bottom. Enlarging the image he comes to see what he had not seen while he was shooting the photograph: a shadow that turns out to be a corpse. Photography, therefore, knows of its existence and its interactions. But going back to the founding element of Roberto Toja's photographic research already contained in the title of the work: "Why time?" The man-made convention wants time to be reduced to a simple unit of measurement: from here to there a certain amount of time goes by, then something happens. Here, however, the author intends to deal with time, trying to understand the substance it is made of, its sense in relation to what happens.
.
.
Warum Die Ziet? Series. Roberto Toja, Berlin 2009
.
.
In these photographs, we see suspended and at the same time fluid figures. Within each image there is a microcosmos that is an integral part of the macrocosmos. It can live independently and be part of something bigger that pulsates and moves. If we could look at each of the scenes from above, we would see a moving mass - "a biological entity, living, within its own organic time" - as he himself writes. A body.
Therefore, photography is much less governable than what we think. Maybe we can choose which device to shoot with and its measurements, but it will always be the photography to choose us. It will induce us to observe it by giving us the illusion of having decided what to snap and when.
THE BOOK: Warum die Zeit? di Roberto Toja, MFD Ed., 2017
THE AUTHOR: Roberto Toja, an enthusiast of sixteenth-century paintings, graduated in Medieval and Modern Art History, he initially approaches photography as a simple subsidy medium to study rural art and architecture. He then expanded this into a social reportage, until it became his real profession. Afterwards, he began to work on his artistic research, intimate and twilight, mainly related to the narrative of memory and its loss, the oblivion and the passage of time.
His pictures exhibited in art galleries are part of prestigious private collections and museums, such as Italian Photography and Alinari. For his projects, he prefers the form of the book because it's an object that restores consistency to memory by saving it from oblivion.
Therefore, photography is much less governable than what we think. Maybe we can choose which device to shoot with and its measurements, but it will always be the photography to choose us. It will induce us to observe it by giving us the illusion of having decided what to snap and when.
THE BOOK: Warum die Zeit? di Roberto Toja, MFD Ed., 2017
THE AUTHOR: Roberto Toja, an enthusiast of sixteenth-century paintings, graduated in Medieval and Modern Art History, he initially approaches photography as a simple subsidy medium to study rural art and architecture. He then expanded this into a social reportage, until it became his real profession. Afterwards, he began to work on his artistic research, intimate and twilight, mainly related to the narrative of memory and its loss, the oblivion and the passage of time.
His pictures exhibited in art galleries are part of prestigious private collections and museums, such as Italian Photography and Alinari. For his projects, he prefers the form of the book because it's an object that restores consistency to memory by saving it from oblivion.
.
.
Warum Die Ziet? Series. Roberto Toja, Berlin 2009
.
Warum Die Ziet? Series. Roberto Toja, Berlin 2009
.
Warum Die Ziet? Series. Roberto Toja, Berlin 2009
.
Warum Die Ziet? Series. Roberto Toja, Berlin 2009
.
Warum Die Ziet? Series. Roberto Toja, Berlin 2009
.
.
.
.
Author Giovanna Gammarota
Translated by Jennifer Cooper
.
.
.
.
.
This article has been published on
.
.
.
Share on
.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
.
.
.
.
Connect