Every Angel Is Terrifying

I have always had an admiration for moody, blurry, grainy, expressionistic black and white photography, as practised by people like Chris Friel, Trent Parke, Irma Haselberger, or (a recent discovery via Tomasz Trzebiatowski's Photosnack) Olga Karlovac. I have no talent for it myself, and my many attempts over the years have rarely made it into the "keepers" box. Which is fine: much as I enjoy listening to Glenn Gould play Bach, I can barely tap out "Happy Birthday" on a keyboard. We are who we are, and I suppose I'm just not a moody, blurry, grainy, expressionistic sort of person. To invert Joni Mitchell, I'm not frightened by the devil, but I'm drawn to those ones who are afraid.

So, talking of the devil [checks behind his left shoulder, oh so casually: nothing... Must be busy today...] I've been doing my own, rather different monochrome thing with some angels I've been meeting around the place, as part of a longer-term angelic project. As mentioned previously – and I'm beginning to wonder, after sixteen years of blogging, whether there's anything I haven't mentioned before, at least once – I've been having fun with some cheap second-hand compact cameras, the sort that offer a ridiculously huge built-in "super zoom" range, inevitably coupled with so-so image quality. Or, in the case of the intriguing Canon Zoom device, truly appalling image quality (see the post Zoom!).

These little compacts fit comfortably into a coat pocket, though, and I enjoy being able to wander about, relatively unencumbered, and choosing between getting up close, taking a broader view, or isolating tighter compositions out of the middle distance; something I'd never do if I had to tote around the Fuji X or Micro 4/3rds equivalent of a 24-800 zoom, even assuming such a beast exists and I could afford one. 

The fact is that you can discover an awful lot of useful post-processing tricks when you try to rescue interesting images of inferior quality, tricks that will also find application in your more usual work. With these angels – spotted doing their apotropaic and tidings-bearing thing in various locations – I have converged on a range of monochrome "looks" that I find both satisfying and appropriate. Moody, blurry, grainy, and expressionistic they're not – don't think I haven't tried – but angels, after all, are ambassadors of clarity and light. Apart, that is, from the ones who are not. About whom, the less said the better.

For beauty is really nothing
but the onset of a terror we can only just endure,
and we marvel at it so because it serenely disdains
our destruction. Every angel is terrifying.

(Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.)

from Duino Elegy 1, by Rainer Maria Rilke (my translation)

Here's my favourite angelic annunciation, by the way. Greetings!