The blue arrives before anything else, sweeping white across the gutter and beyond, as if the fold of the book could not stop it, as if nothing could. It is a scream that comes from the body before the mind can even catch up. BLUE BOOK by André Baumecker has sat open to this spread for a week. The image splatters, scrapes, and hisses. I cannot tell if it’s a photogram, a darkroom intervention, or graffiti documented, and the refusal to be any one thing is what draws me to it. What the image holds onto is action. Not the record of an action, but action as the image itself. A coil at the moment of explosion.
There was a moment in my week of returning to this photo where I thought about reaching out to the artist to learn more about how the image was made. I started drafting an email, but midway, I deleted it. I did not want to influence a week of staring at the work like a well to reflect in, a Walden Pond for a brief time. Accompanying the book was a red page that included text by Clarice Panadés. The last line reads “this blue scream is the will to live”. I read this like a crack of a whip.
This blue scream does not resolve. It refuses a narrow definition. That uncertainty isn’t a problem with the image. It is what the image is doing. When I look at it I remember what photography is allowed to be. This blue scream breaks the loop. It does not run the program. It tears through it.
The camera is not a neutral tool. It is a program with intentions built into it by its manufacturer and by the culture that produced it. Every default, every mass cultural expectation, every assumption that something must be in focus, pushes the photographer toward a particular kind of image. Most photography runs this program without questioning it. The program wants a legible subject, a resolved image, a document. It wants to be pointed at something. Baumecker’s blue does not cooperate. It arrives through decisions that the camera’s program never anticipated.
I keep returning to the top right corner where the blue splatters into something chaotic. The sun exploding from a vantage point in space. A snowball smashing over my shoulder. A rock hitting water. The image does not tell me which one it is. It does not have to.
Photography does not require a camera pointed at something. It requires light, surface, and time. What you do with those three things is the whole question. This blue scream answers it by insisting that an image can be made rather than taken, felt rather than recorded. It lives in that top right corner. Not the resolved center but the edge where the program breaks down and something unplanned gets through.
“Blue scream” is from BLUE BOOK by André Baumecker. Self published in 2021.
Link to André Baumecker’s website:
http://www.andrebaumecker.com/
A Week With is a weekly writing series focused on a single image from my art and photobook library. I spend seven days returning to the image and write about what it brings into focus about culture and the present moment.