The first time I looked through Igor Posner’s Cargó (Red Hook Editions, 2022) I was bewildered. I did not know, for example, that across 160 pages and what feels like triple that number of images, it would express the disjointedness and poignancy of memory, or that it would render the experience of time passing as something deeply felt on each page. Nor did I know that the photographs were primarily made in immigrant communities of the former Soviet Union across the United States, from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, from Chicago to southwest Brooklyn; or that for Posner, the book was an attempt at giving form to the psychological experience of migration, and at tracing how these neighborhoods have changed over time.
Instead, what I first registered was the book’s visual multiplicity, which Posner channels through a dense sequence and layering of images. The first page demonstrates this with a vertical pairing that, in a way, prepares us for what follows: on top, a green thicket dotted with white flowers, rendered deliberately inexact and softened by blurry contours; and below, in black and white, an old man walking, specter-like, down a sidewalk infused with atmosphere and suggestion. These are vivid, impressionistic images that, in their open-endedness, reinforce one another.
Posner keeps to this free-associative vein throughout the book. Though certain people do reappear, and some intimate scenes suggest a personal connection to Posner himself, a consistent feeling throughout is one of dislocation, of a sudden change in place followed by an unexpected, and often beguiling, combination of images. What keeps the sequence grounded, cohesive even, is the way it returns, time and again, to a wide cast of characters in those aforementioned cities, all of whom seem caught in between one place and another, one moment and the next.
Rather than treat his subjects as archetypes, whether ethnic, religious or otherwise, Posner often casts them in a transitory state: he abstracts and distorts; he crops tight to exaggerate a facial feature; he focuses on something essential from the moment – a gesture or expression – which may seem overwrought at times, or quietly moving at others. That he keeps these people from being overly specific is what allows for the gradual construction of something we might call a “psychological” space in the book, a composite of so many different moments, textures and moods, and something which is concerned with a collective experience rather than a strictly personal one.
Rarely do we see someone on the page and expect to learn something about their inner lives. Instead, we read them more as emotive units in a montage, and this gets at what, for lack of a better word, is the “cinematic” aspect of Posner’s book. There is a liquid quality to the editing such that the turn of each page seems to happen as though by the force of gravity. Likewise, the images often seem so concentrated for effect that we can imagine them having been pulled from another montage altogether, where their meaning was different but complex all the same.
In a short, almost aphoristic text that concludes the book, Posner tells us about the influence that Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1958) had on the project. Specifically, he cites Bachelard’s analogy of memory to the structure of a three-story house, in which the ground floor stands in for our everyday reality; the attic contains those things we seldom dwell on, but which we can recall and speak about once prompted by specific, meaning-laden objects; and the cellar, where light doesn’t penetrate, is where we “keep” things that remain out of reach or beyond recall – something close, perhaps, to our subconscious. Though Posner resisted using this as a structure for the book for fear it would seem too contrived, nonetheless, the Poetics offers us another of Bachelard’s concepts as a way of making sense of Posner’s images and how he weaves them together: “When the image is new, the world is new.” (Bachelard, 47.)
Bachelard was trying to describe what he saw as a fundamental component of the poetic object and our experience with it: estrangement, that process of troubling our familiarity with the world so that we can contemplate it in a new or heightened way. The world of Cargó teems with an overriding sense of the newness that Bachelard was describing, and though this is produced by the editing and layout, it is also attributable to the variety of cameras Posner used during the making of this work, including a rangefinder, twin- and single-lens reflex cameras, 35mm and even plastic “toy” cameras. The stylistic diversity this lends to the work is enormously effective at making the psychological and metaphysical dimensions of the work seem tangible from page to page – a feeling that what is specific is also a conduit to something broader and more universal. Where it is less effective, if only because it is a suggestive and lyrical mode of image making, is in the exploration of how these immigrant communities may have changed or even disappeared over time. The freedom with which Posner moves across time and space in the sequence challenges the capacity of his images to articulate discrete changes in one neighborhood or the next. In the end, though, this is a minor quibble. Ultimately, what Posner has created with his images and their sequencing, layout and design is an aesthetic space overflowing with metaphoric potential.
Igor Posner