On Reality Expressed, reality Created, and on Being Present:

The photography works of Romany can be described, in both modern and contemporary perspectives, as formalist and aesthetic, accessible in the visual sense, each work interacts with the viewer independently of her / his prior knowledge or appreciation of a particular function, context or any history.

When Roger Fry (1) and Clive Bell (2) established the foundations of formalism in art, both of them referring to painting as a reference, --though in contemporary references both are cited in relation to “any” artwork, not just painting--, their description while approaching the photographic realms of Romany Hafez still come to mind. In the black and white photographs of Hafez, the viewer is confronted with spaces, and shadows of people, three dimensional, “formal” in every way.

The photography works of Romany can be described, in both modern and contemporary perspectives, as formalist and aesthetic, accessible in the visual sense, each work interacts with the viewer independently of her / his prior knowledge or appreciation of a particular function, context or any history. When Roger Fry (1) and Clive Bell (2) established the foundations of formalism in art, both of them referring to painting as a reference, --though in contemporary references both are cited in relation to “any” artwork, not just painting--, their description while approaching the photographic realms of Romany Hafez still come to mind. In the black and white photographs of Hafez, the viewer is confronted with spaces, and shadows of people, three dimensional, “formal” in every way.

In Hafez project To be Present, the viewer of Hafez’s photographs of spaces enters a universe that transcends time: the nature of black and white photography takes one into a historical past known as the century of photography, the twentieth century, while the nature of the depicted outdoor places and indoor spaces defies all predictions of the frozen moment, and poses speculation about the time precision of past present and future. In the twentieth century, Clive Bell claimed that the actual practice of image making and of image viewing, one cannot judge or jury an artwork by their inherent intrinsic formal qualities alone. If one agrees, then all photographs of Romany Hafez defy space and time, and confront the viewer by their stunning aesthetics, reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s remark: “a painting has a mind of its own”, and in the Romany Hafez case, each of his depicted spaces has a mind, time, narrative, aesthetics and a memory of its own.

In his 1989 paramount work An Ontology of Art (3), British philosopher Gregory Currie coined the critical term “Aesthetic Empiricism”, where all boundaries of the aesthetic –which in itself is an elusive expression-- are set by the boundaries of the viewer’s vision, her / his hearing or their verbal understanding, “depending on which art form is in question”. In his project To Be Present, Hafez’s photographs stimulate the visual understanding of the viewer’s references, coming up with a set of aesthetics that characterizes and completes Hafez’s body of work exhibited in the last five years.

Formalism in aesthetics has traditionally been taken to refer to the view in the philosophy of art that the properties in virtue of which an artwork is an artwork— and in virtue of which its value is determined—are formal in the sense of being accessible by direct sensation (typically sight or hearing) alone.

In To Be Present, for the first time in his exhibited projects of black and white photographs, Hafez uses the technique of analogue double exposure in innuendos of people who appear-and-or-disappear within the same physical space; faces and figures attempt to pass in front of the lens, an attempt to be part of a frozen moment, or an attempt “to be present”, and in any of the cases the subjects exist in a dichotomy of absence and presence alike. Every space is abandoned, deserted, though every detailed form in the image indicates presence, humans who live or have lived in such spaces: the viewer would never know. People, women and men alike do exist sometimes, in apparition form, where the body mass exists in an ethereal dimension, floating in weightlessness; souls and spirits who visit spaces of their older physical bodies, or maybe they have never left their physical spaces. Souls, freed from their physical bodies exist thus in solid physical spaces. The dichotomy is accentuated by the medium of black and white, where the physical space-time continuum is shattered successfully, and viewers may be able to live the quantum of time, but never know if the moment is in the past, present or future.

In his simple yet complex process of taking photographs —rather “making” photographs—the reflection of Susan Sontag about the role of the photographer haunts the viewer who confronts the works of Romany Hafez: “Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience”(4).

Cited
1- Roger Fry, Vision and Design, 1920.
2- Clive Bell, Art. 1913, Good Press Kindle Edition, 2019
3- Gregory Currie, An Ontology of Art. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989 pp 18.
4- Susan Sontag, On Photography. London, Penguin Books, 1977, pp 6.


Khaled Hafez
Cairo, 2018

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