Sad Poetry

When I first saw Anna Kahn’s photos, I had a strange feeling, a certain anguish which I would only later liken to what I had felt a long time ago when contemplating the paintings of Edward Hopper: those half-unreal characters, alienated and absolutely helpless, like, for example, in Nighthawks, with the three lonely customers sitting at the counter.

But Anna’s experiment seems to me to be even more radical. In Hopper’s painting there are living people, albeit lost in isolation and abandon, in her photographs the expression of human despair, and the pain of loss are achieved without any figure, face or gesture. In these nocturnal, deserted landscapes of still life and grief, the light itself is ghostly, and dramatizes rather than illuminates the solitude.

What is most mysterious is that, even so, every photo contains a story. In each there exists a hidden and foretold tragedy. Yes, because they are images that portray violence. But instead of shock, impact and appeal, or semi-obscene scenes of explicit evil, there is concision, ellipsis and subtext. The culture of violence, as is well known, is so insiduous that it has contaminated not only the means of combatting it - the use of force against force - but also its means of expression through art.

There is an “aesthetics of violence” with rhetoric as brutal as the object that it registers. The post-modern universe is polluted with exasperation and hysteria. The art of this photographic essay, however, is that it manages to escape this danger: it seeks not the immediate mirror-reflection, but the reflection of contemplation.

While she rejects clichés, stereotypes and morbid anecdotes, Anna does not allow her art to be limited to the individual and restricted story of a woman from Rio de Janeiro, and decides to tell of something more transcendendent: the phenomenon of stray bullets in the city.

What is most impressive in Anna Kahn’s work is that she succeeds in photographing that which cannot be photographed: absence, emptiness, the silence one can almost hear or see. Desolation. There is no space for anything, except for poetry – a sad poetry.

Zuenir Ventura