In an exchange with a student in 2015, the Russian photographer Gueorgui Pinkhassov said that one goal of taking pictures was to “transform everything into form”. His experience, he suggested, showed that the more “irresponsibly” a photographer approached the high seriousness of getting a good picture, the more likely they were to succeed. He referenced something that the French poet Paul Valéry wrote in 1894: “Most people see with their intellects much more often than with their eyes. Instead of coloured spaces, they become aware of concepts.”
Pinkhassov, mentored in Russia by the film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky, was elected to the Magnum agency in 1988, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. He put his philosophy of concentrating on “coloured spaces” into practice in his 1998 book Sightwalk, a collection of photographs from the streets of Tokyo. This image from that book, taken in a hotel in the city – and included in the forthcoming Magnum square print sale – reflected all of his thinking about framing and light. Our minds may want to reduce the scene to a mundane idea of hotel foyers, but our eyes are thrilled by the patterns of shadow.
During that journey in Japan, Pinkhassov observed some calligraphy artists going into a trance as they worked, becoming as one with their brushes, oblivious to external realities. His ambition was to find that engagement with his camera; the moments he stilled in Japan included images of a schoolgirl seen through a subway window and curious glimpses of road junctions from high-rise vantages. In all cases the scenes threaten pure abstraction, surfaces always complicated, as here, by the play of light. Pinkhassov’s work brings to mind a line from another poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Glory be to God for dappled things… Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)…”