"Gablitz"

gelatin silver print

signed, titled, dated and numbered on verso

Images emerge from the darkness – in black and white: flowers, foliage and florets. Deadly nightshade, perhaps? Night steadfastly ignores shadows. Peter Schlemihl, lest you have lost your shadow, you shall henceforth be known as Robert Zahornicky. For ever more; the background remains obscure (Darkness, darkness, be my pillow). Hark the sounds of the night (Can you hear me, Robert?) Zahornicky casts light upon darkness – via photography. Your name is thus Lucifer, the fallen angel; it means ‘the bearer of light’. It illuminates sunflowers – no moons appears brighter – fronds, apple trees and agave.

Do the willows weep because the shade has abandoned them? Compare the orchids –orchida(y)ceous or orchidnighteous. Barkless birches, their leaves reflecting intermittent light in brightest white. Emulating the leaves I sit and reflect – until struck by the flash of an idea. And somewhere a bicycle, a blaze of chrome. Structures, seen objectively. No living being far and wide. People sleep. Unmoved the stone man with wife and infant child limns his block of marble. None other than the painter, Engelhart. (veneration of angels). Who knows? White? Black is me!

(Manfred Chobot, translated by Peter Lillie)