Newspaper Page Text
*
P*|« 14 THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE March 10, 1978
enlightened
photographer
"Through the true photographic landscape, we learn to love,
once again the wonder, the grandeur and the intimacies of nature;
through the true photographic portrait, we respond, again, to the
dignify and the nobilify of the human countenance.”
—From My Enlightening Heart, photo album by Joel Orent
Photographer Joel Orent gets his camera ready for a shot.
Brookline, Massachussets: nature at its best.
light meter. Edward Steichen, renowned producer of “Family of
Man,” washable to take outstanding photos with a simple, dime
store camera, without benefit of tripod, light meter, et al.
Equipment can do more than the perceptive capacity of its user.
This in itself is a point of “My Enlightening Heart” that is worthy
of note in an age of technological ascendence.
Orent's direct message relates to what he views as the unhealthy
compartmentalization of art and morality—unhealthy to art no
less than morality—and of race, religion, nationality and creed.
Orent is uniquely equipped todiscuss these matters. He holds
degrees from Yale, Harvard and Columbia, including graduate
degrees in English, literature, rabbinics, and business
administration, and he did extensive doctoral research in
comparative religion as a President’s scholar. He has been a full
time photographer for ten years and maintains an active personal
correspondence with some of America’s best photographers, such
as Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, and with a host of intellectuals,
rabbis an<J artists around the world.
To Orent, morality which cannot express itself artistically is
deficient because it does not partakd of the most universal, nay,
divine, worldly substance, light. The physical luminosity in nature
and people G-d's creations- is matched by a spiritual
luminosity in Torah. Morality at its peak complements normative
behavior with appreciation and expression of the luminosity
which pervades nature and mankind and the absolute divine
receptacle, Torah.
Orent points out that even in modern physics, light is not
apprehended in purely physical terms, but, as the introduction to
“My Enlightening Heart” says, "is described as radiant energy,
now wave, now corpuscular.”
Just as morality is reliant on art, so, too, art is reliant on
morality. Orent rejects the notion that immoral individuals can
produce good art. The criteria which consider the art of moral
cripples to be good are themselves deficient.
“To give an example from the ancient world,” Orent wrote in
Musar Anthology, “our sages visited pagan Rome and were
astonished to observe statues being clothed in warm wraps while
beggars froze in Rome’s streets for lack of proper clothing.”
Orent’s photos are intended to reflect the work of a moral,
Torah observant Jew, a man who attempts to supplement his
imaginative and meditative faculties by uprooting personal
qualities which turn one against his fellow man.
Orent believes that art, to be true, must also adhere to moral
injunctions against portraying the nude. Writes Orent: “The
greatest masters of the straightforward school of photography,
such as Yousuf Karsh and Ansel Adams, have never once
exhibited a nude in their long lives of creative work. The nude may
appear to be autonomous, but she is, in fact, lost to us as daughter,
sister, mother, grandmother The purely erotic alienates man
Tcmima Goldberg, daughter of Hillel Goldberg.
by Hillel Goldberg
“My Enlightening Heart" is an album of 73 photographs,
including 11 color plates, with a long introduction in Hebrew and
shorter ones in English and Arabic. The album carries titles in
Hebrew and Arabic as well as in English.
The photographs include scenes of Israel and the occupied
territories, and portraits of Jewish, Christian and Moslem
intellectuals, artists and workers and small children.
Clearly, this is an album not only with photographs but with a
message. This is made explicit by a note on the title page which
reads: “All profits realized from the sale of this book are dedicated
to orphans and to victims of war."
The photography is uniformly superb throughout. Each nature
shot represents hours of waiting and each portrait hours of
discussion. Waiting and discussion are, for Joel Orent, no less
Holocaust survivor Mottel Klinger
important than technique, in producing significant photographs.
Waiting refers to an inner willingness or patience tranquility,
if you will— to observe the effects of sunlight on nature. Sun rays
pierce the atmosphere in varying degrees of diffusion, and it is the
photographer’s duty to devote countless hours noting the
diffusion and discerning the moment when the sun itself most
acutely illuminates the scene.
Orent rises before dawn to observe a lake minutes after sunrise;
he climbs mountains and treks through wilderness from dawn to
dusk, weeks on end, to merit a few moments of pure light.
Persons, no less than nature, manifest radiance, and it is only
through self-effacement and an attuned ear which is ready to
spend hours listening to the subject that the photographer will
succeed in taping and recording the subject’s own refraction of the
human radiance.
Orent’s cultivation of his own power of seeing and listening is
manifested in “My Enlightening Heart” by the remarkable fact
that none of these luminous photos were taken with the aid of
artificial lighting and many were taken without the benefit of a
Rabbi Yehuda l.eib Ne kritz: Musar master and suvivor of six years in a
Siberian slave labor camp (1939-45).
✓
✓
+ A
r * v ^ *
- V*
Rabbi Levi Yitzhak Horowitz, known as “The Bostoner Rebbe," is a direct descendent of the founder of Hassidim, “The Baal Shem Tov.”
from true relationships with nature, with himself, and with the
spirit.”
Art unified with morality has a unique role to play in settling
international conflicts. Such art creates “forms adequate to
represent what is beyond the cul de sac” of overkill, investment of
tax monies in death skills, and the post-Holocaust, post-
Hiroshima cultural consciousness of “guilt, regret and fear, which
drive us to nihilism."
Orent’s art aims to create a new consciousness which, rooted in
morality and selflessness, will be “free of racial, caste, credal, class
and national boundaries." This art must reject “the visual styles of
op and pop art and of withdrawal into unnatural realms of
abstraction," which “lose heart for everyday contact with the
natural world and with the physical appearance and spiritual
condition of the human species.”
The tool of the new art is light, on which “no church, race,
nation, sect, party, company or union enjoys any exclusive rights,
permanent privileges, protected patents or secret monopolies."
Light, the basis of the straightforward school of photography
to which Orent belongs, has already “taken a responsible moral
lead in challenging the crude blasphemy of war, in exposing
grinding poverty, in establishing the critical, moral case for
wilderness conservation and world ecological standards.”
The new art “generates acceptance of responsibility to the
vegetable and the animal kingdoms, and to man, the epitome of
creation.
“Through the true photographic landscape, we learn to love,
once again, the wonder, the grandeur and the intimacies of nature;
through the true photographic portrait, we respond again to the
dignity and the nobility of the human countenance.
“For both survival and enlightenment, we must once again
intuit the melody of the world’s forests and the vastness of the
earth’s mountain ranges, the music of the peoples and the
language of the birds and animals, fish and insects: spiritual
dialogue itself."
If you wonder how all this can be captured in photographs, see
Joel Orent’s “My Enlightening Heart ." You’ll be deeply surprised.
Photographs by Joel Orent are on display at Whyte Hall, Emory
University. For exhibit hours, contact the Department of Religion,
Emory University at 329-7596.
P«t* 15 THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE March 10. 1978
