Variations on the Ten Commandments | It Is the Soul That Sees
By Shani Litman
Haaretz.
A chance encounter with blind photographer Alex de Jong changed Laetitia Boulud's life. Now they are exhibiting together in Geneva.
On Alex de Jong's profile page, Laetitia Boulud found texts, recordings, and thousands of photographs he had taken. She looked at the images, read the texts, and was mesmerized. "His photographs revealed what I thought could be seen in the deepest sense. I started asking him about the images, about his technique, about the story behind them, why he took them and what he felt in that moment. Later he explained to me that for him, it's the soul that sees, not the eye."
Boulud, 35, was born in Montreal and now lives in Tel Aviv. She studied photography at a camera obscura and has exhibited her work. De Jong, born in the Netherlands, married and a father, worked in photography before losing his sight. He says that when he realized he was losing his vision, he wished to die. "I felt like a tourist in this new world of blindness, and also a stranger in the world of sight I had just left. I didn't belong anywhere. Everything slipped away from me — the space around me and the sense of my own body."
He describes how gradually, as he adjusted to the loss of sight, he began to feel himself "seeing" through his other senses — hearing, touch. The next stage was the feeling that he could continue to document, through photography, what he sensed around him, what he felt beneath his feet. "I discovered I still loved the sound the shutter makes, even if I couldn't see the pictures I'd taken."
He admits he was suspicious of the connection with Boulud at first. "I thought she was doing this for the wrong reasons, out of some romantic notion of blindness. I remember her first questions weighed on me. My wounds hadn't healed yet; I didn't have much to do with her questions except try to defend my choice to be a blind photographer." But the encounter with Boulud was intense and signaled a major change to come. "I felt I was approaching an edge from which I'd have to jump into the abyss — that I'd be forced to confront both the blindness and the photography, not hide. When I had to face my frustration at not being able to see the images Laetitia was talking about, I began to engage with my own perception, and with my own longing to see. It was a painful process, but a necessary one."
Boulud felt torn — on one hand wanting to share her impressions of his work with de Jong, and on the other wanting feedback from him on her own photographs — but she quickly realized that her work, in its current form, meant nothing to him. The frustration was compounded by a growing sense of urgency once she understood that de Jong was suffering from a serious illness, and that his days — and the days of their connection — might be numbered.
"I didn't know exactly what I was doing at the time, but one thing was clear — I had to stay in touch," she explains. "My need for feedback on my work began to stir. But it was clear to me that I hadn't managed to get through to him. My photographed pieces of paper meant nothing to him. They only gained meaning once I managed to make him feel — physically, vocally, and textually — what was in them. But we set out on a journey, over the course of which we developed a special language suited to the place we had arrived at."
The Jewish Monk
The long online conversations about the essence of each other's work led to a deep bond and a decision to create together. Today they define themselves as a "studio." But despite the intense connection that developed, for a long time they made do with an online relationship alone. Only this past October did Boulud visit de Jong in person for the first time, in Rotterdam. When Boulud wondered why de Jong also went by the name Ludro Rigdzin, it turned out this was his name as a teacher and Tibetan Buddhist monk — of Jewish origin, incidentally. De Jong became a monk in 1987 following a meeting with the man who became his teacher, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche.
Following that meeting, de Jong also became Boulud's teacher in Buddhism. Today he sees parallels between Buddhism and their shared working process. "Buddhism is a practice, in the sense of an ongoing, daily commitment to a way of life," he explains. "Because of our different geographic locations, our daily communication itself became a kind of ongoing practice that shapes much of our working process. Also, in the sense that Buddhism largely deals with exploring the 'in-between' of the world — exploring undefined places — our work is an expression of that, in that we try to bring people into that experience in a very tangible, direct way. To do that, we need to explore that same in-between place within our own working process too — which means letting go of fear as the emotion that dictates most of our actions."
The piece that Boulud and de Jong are currently exhibiting at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Geneva is part of an exhibition comprising six installations displayed in alternative spaces around the city. The work, "Longing for Sight," expresses the new method they developed for talking about photography in a way that neutralizes the sense of sight. "Our work is multifaceted, moving between photographed objects and large spaces," say Boulud and de Jong. "There's a dark space there that only seems empty, but anything can happen inside it. It's a space that is always in the process of becoming. Everything there floats, nothing is fixed, everything is relative. It's a journey through time. It's a place you cannot reach through sight alone.
"One of our blindness was, of course, the initial subject around which we connected, but very quickly it became a tool rather than a limitation. Giving up sight as the dominant sense in visual art allowed us to rethink the visual. Relying solely on eyesight has its limits, and choosing not to depend on it as the sole source of sensory information frees us to discover other things hidden behind sight. We feel a need to make photography accessible in ways other than a piece of cardboard on a wall."