Andrei Tarkovsky, polaroid self portrait. Polaroid copyright: Tarkovsky Foundation

‘My pictures mean nothing more than what they are... We don't know ourselves very well. At times we give expression to a force that can't be measured by ordinary standards.’ This is how Andrei Tarkovski explains his film work – in a modest and unpretentious manner, at the same time leaving room for perceptive ambivalence, which dominates his entire creative work – through realism, aiming at higher powers. Tarkovski always leaves room for ‘something else’, something intangible that cannot be understood intellectually, but is felt and perceived intuitively. Here Tarkovski’s idea is very close to Giorgio Agamben’s thoughts about photography. According to Agamben, a photograph is always more that just a photograph; it is the sublime gap between perception and understanding, reproduction and reality, memory and hope. In their own way both seem to acknowledge the fact of the intricacy of interpretation or that it is unnecessary, placing the main focus on the aspect of perception in our relationship to artwork.

Text by: Ragne Nukk (Kunst.ee 3-4/2011)