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The Possible Worlds of Maria Kapajeva
You can call him another man is a book where old family photographs, narrative voice and literary device combine to reveal the open-ended nature of the visual narrative.
There are two main inspirations for the book. The overreaching narrative structure is provided by Italo Calvino’s book, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. This is a book which has chapters that examine reading, narrative, the fluidity of story-telling, and the contingency of reading.
Mixed in with these chapters of commentaries are a series of short stories, multiple beginnings of novels that have no conclusion, that leave the endings, if there are any, up to the reader.
Key quotes from Calvino reinforce the structure, and remind us that the pictures we see are not as solidly set as we might believe. The first quote goes like this:
‘But how to establish the exact moment in which a story begins? Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.’
Dropped in after this are pictures from a box of negatives Kapajeva found at her parents’ house in present day Estonia,. These images are culled from 200 rolls of film shot between 1966 and 1974, before Kapajeva was born, made when Estonia was part of the Soviet Union. In that sense the images are a kind of attempt to know her father as he was, before he became a father, to impose a narrative on him as a man in a place at a time.
These images are divided into short sequences that are corollaries to Calvino’s novel openings. So we begin with a series of images that have the whiff of surveillance about them, shot from windows (with frames in view) all off-kilter in true surveillance style and reminiscent of Jens Klein’s Stasi pictures, Sophie Calle’s Suite Vénitienne or Vito Acconci’s Following Piece. Or better yet, the surveillance montages from a million spy or cop movies.
There are group shots suggestive of meetings, fold out sequences of people walking down distant streets, everything seems surreptitious and closed. You are under observation, and then the next chapter pops up.
‘Who’s that girl’, reads the text, so the spy genre shifts Calvino-like into the romance, and then the romance into the mystery, and the mystery into a nostalgia trip where shots of old television screens (look, there’s Yuri Gagarin) mix with strangely posed images that morph into a sea adventure where Jacques Cousteau blends into the Beatles.
The more it goes on, the odder it gets, the odder it gets the more it merges into one strange story where, as Calvino’s caption reads, “Everybody resembles everybody else[…].”
So there’s the story, and really it’s multiple stories all rolled into one. Underpinning it all is the story that is there from the start, the story of Kapajeva’s father. His presence interferes and intrudes throughout, every now and then emerging so we can construct a little of his story, the story we imagine him to have, this story merging with and against the visual directions that Kapajeva takes us. It’s a series of possible fathers living in possible worlds.
You can call him another man is a complex book that is also quite simple. It loosens up how we see the world, in particular how we see images from the past. They are not tied down by the archive, by the box they were found in, or by the relationship that the photographer had to the subject. It’s a reworking of the idea that images are malleable and can be subjected to new meaning. On one level, that is a power that comes with great responsibility. But on the other level it is a liberation from the tyranny of the tightly wound indexical image and the tightly wound ways of seeing and thinking about photography that come with it.
In that sense You can call him another man is an invitation to roam outside the small box photography sometimes puts itself in, it is an embracing of the wider worlds of visual culture in all their varied forms, from the highbrow to the lowbrow and back again.
Visual meaning isn’t fixed, nor is the work of Maria Kapajeva.
– reviewed for Photomonitor by Colin Pantall
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For further details of this book and how to order it please visit the artist’s website.
