Gundula Schulze Eldowy

The Gaze is Answered by the Gazed-Upon

I roam the night with my eyes
a lake full of dreams / embraces me

Looks / can be flames / in the stream of solar wind

30 November 2000 will remain in my memory forever. It was on that day that I arrived in Peru. I didn’t know a single soul, couldn’t speak a word of Spanish and had merely followed an intuition that told me something of myself lay hidden there. I stood at Lima airport and asked myself, “What am I doing here?” I had finished with my past. I wanted to plunge into something new. The photographer I had hitherto been appeared frozen in the gaze of a sixtieth of a second. Bit by bit I had removed myself from life, had become distant and impatient and only considered goals to be valid. Even physical contact was no more. I had become increasingly forced into the role of observer. I was continually exploring the reality of other people, who, in a certain sense, were unconscious projections of my own self. What had happened? For over 25 years photography had been a source of inspiration and joy; now it only meant stress. I was caught up in the wake of pictures in which seeing was the only thing that counted. Photographers are blind. They fail to grasp that something else exists beneath the surface. They comfort themselves with an illusion of vision, convey the impression that what they photograph actually exists. However, it is already gone the instant they release the shutter. Life is a river that incessantly moves and changes everything. The transitory is the permanent.
Tellingly, it was a blind person who made the first photograph: Nicéphore Niépce. It shows a view from a window with a shadow on the wall. In Peru I immediately saw that I had entered a country of large eyes. Never before have I seen eyes with such magnetic power. But nowhere else have I also encountered so many blind people. The woman inside me with the frozen gaze… I had to rid myself of her.
If one observes a human eye at close quarters, one is confronted with a black tunnel, there where the iris is. The interior is lost in darkness. When I look inside myself I sometimes have the feeling that I am an enormous cosmic eye. The eyes are the only spherical parts of the body. In the all- round projection of a sphere, gazes cross one another in a multitude of ways; gazes, each of which can go in different directions—upwards,
downwards, inwards, outwards—as well as on different temporal levels. Seeing eyes are rotating galaxies. I once saw a bin full of cattle eyes in a slaughterhouse. They looked like marbles. The body forms the eyes at the very end; after entering the world they open. Eyes are aids to orientation. However, the actual seeing takes place in the brain. The forebrain thinks in pictures, the hindbrain in tones. We can also see with closed eyes. However, seeing in the dark takes on a different quality. It reveals our own world. Without limits. Without judging. Without differentiating. When gazing inwards, I sometimes encounter the most peculiar forms, quite unexpectedly. As if they were a part of me, their voices, rising from uncharted depths, provide me with advice. A whispering in the sea of memory. Conversely, looking within can also be followed outwards. From the inner darkness out into the light. The gaze is answered by a gazed-upon. While I look at a face, from inside to outside, my face is also perceived by someone else in the same way. But what do we really see? I would like to know.
Only the dead have no face. In Peru my face disintegrated into a thousand pieces. I rediscovered myself in the legacy of the ancient Peruvians, who, like myself, had recorded faces. Not on photographs, but on textiles and clay pots, in stone and sand… In Paracas, for example, I discovered faces on cloths that had been used for the burial of mummies. In Tiwanaku I entered an ancient temple gallery with 175 stone faces. Faces of all human types were depicted there. To my astonishment, they mirrored my idea of Das unfassbare Gesicht (“The Ungraspable Face”). Thousands of years ago, someone else had had the same idea. I had never seen pictures of this gallery before. How could such a synchronization come about? For my part I had selected a serial technique in which I photographed the same section of face, with only the eyes, nose and mouth visible. In the temple gallery in Tiwanaku the same section of the face was chiselled into the stone. This strict choice of frame generated a strange effect. Regardless of which material the faces were formed from—whether it be stone, flesh, bark or clay—they were all identical in one respect: they were composed of seven holes, the brain’s entrances and exits. The whole of perception proceeds through these seven openings in the head. The world enters us through the ears. We go out into the world with the eyes. However, in distinction to hearing, seeing is influenced by the self. What I see is in reality not that which I believe I am seeing. The spatial perspective is deceptive. It only exists in the eyes. Not in the ears. Not in the nose. The forms and boundaries that the eye perceives do not exist in reality. The world reflected in the eyes is how we want to see it, not how it is. That is why 100 people can experience the same thing and still see something different.
Everything that exists, exists now. Only experience in the now is real. Everything else is illusory. Either not yet there or already passed. I am in the now. Not tomorrow. Not in yesterday either. The psychological phenomenon of perception is especially interesting. It leads me to doubt whether the world out there exists at all. Isn’t the creation something that takes place at every instant? The majority of people believe that God created the world in the distant past; they fail to grasp that they themselves are the creation. It takes place in all of us every day. From experience I know that there is an energetic seeing that is not dependent on the eyes. The inner eye sees by other means, precisely in an energetic sense. It is not a perception of objects, but far more of colours, energy and light. I became aware of this even as I was making the social photos. I could never have made them if I had only paid attention to what I had seen physically. Instead, I photographed what I felt, what revealed itself to me intuitively. All my pictures were created like this. They came from the innermost part of me; I couldn’t say where. All I know is that reflections and images have something magical about them. Their source is unknown. At some point I noticed that they became reality, which means they found their counterpart on the outside, that they realized themselves. Imagination and dream are sisters of reality. Ultimately, all I was interested in was creating images of energy. I used the external world in order to create inner pictures. On my travels around the world I made use of certain places because they contained aspects that were also contained in me. I was in harmony with them. In my photos, it is not about New York, Cairo or Lima; it is about the spirit. For me, being an artist means being close to the spirit. Tremendous forces are at work that can scorch one. I see the spirit in music, in poetry and painting. It is only photography that appears captive to the traditional idea of generating a truthful reproduction of reality.
Before I travelled to the north of Peru, I didn’t know that the region was famous for its seers. There are many shamans there. I soon got to know the son of a famous Moche shaman, who later became my husband. I immediately felt on the same wavelength as his family. We were like- minded people. Through their influence, my life received a new facet. Through them I came into contact with a school of seeing passed down through time immemorial. According to this teaching there is no difference between vision, dream and reality—all these levels seamlessly merge into one another. One cannot separate them. They are simply different levels of perception of one and the same spirit. One cannot see, smell or taste energy. It is intangible. It is precisely here that the problems begin, as the invisible is just as real as the visible, as I live according to it. Feelings, for example, are invisible; as are thoughts, although they are real. In Germany.
I could not live out this particular quality of life. They were in my pictures, but not in my life. Now I wanted to have the spiritual in my everyday life.
The Moche culture, whose greatest empire was in the north of the country, is part of Peru’s ancient heritage. Impressive adobe pyramids and goldsmith work are preserved to this day. On countless ceramics the Moche left a symbol writing that is still understood by today’s descendants. It is through this that their ancient philosophy was revealed to me.
According to Moche lore the spirit of the earth is represented as a snake. America is the head. Peru is the eyes. Europe is the neck with the tonal centre; Egypt represents the heart; Africa the stomach; China the internal sexual organs. The tail unites with the head creating a perfect circuit… This lore confirmed what I had suspected for a long time; I was amongst people of my own kind, people who like me are guided by seeing. However, their eyes were those of dreamers. As before, I lived and worked with the people and things that I photographed. So it was that I was one day confronted with the ‘stone test’, in which the village shaman asks someone who has come to see him to read from a stone. What he reveals comes from the depths of his unconscious, without premeditation. He has projected himself onto the stone without being aware of it. Wasn’t I doing a similar thing? I sharpened my perception and noticed that as soon as I projected my inner being onto a counterpart, confusing situations arose. Until I understood: I cannot see myself. It is only in the mirror of the other that I recognise myself. The shaman’s family, in which I live to this day, reflected me without design, precisely because they were the same as me. Their mistake was mine. They reflected me at every turn. One only needed to imitate me to see the effect. It is astonishing. Ultimately it was these reflections of everyday life that fundamentally changed my perception. Everything I perceive, in a mysterious fashion, has to do with me. On a psychological level everything that one encounters in the world has a counterpart in oneself. The visionary power of the shamans also extends from the fact that what they perceive in others they know from themselves. The path to the other passes through oneself. Every judgement is a judgement of oneself. When I ceased projecting, life revealed itself to me in all its magnificence. At last, things could be the way they are. Myself included.
The ancient Moche were obsessed with faces. They have left behind an incredibly comprehensive gallery of faces, predominately in the form of ceramic portraits. The faces are vivid and realistic and have an almost photographic look. They had the same obsession as we do today: the desire to preserve everything in pictures. As if they foresaw their demise. The Moche culture inexplicably disappeared in the eighth century, just as that of the Maya. By all appearances they left their cities of their own free will. Since I began studying their history this one question has continued to haunt me: what caused a whole people to bury their possessions in the ground, cover temples, pyramids and images of their gods with clay and move on?
The ceramic portraits were discovered by accident 1,500 years later. Italian immigrants, cultivating sugar cane in the north of Peru, discovered them on their fields by chance. They had also left their homeland. Just like me. When I ask today’s descendants of the Moche for the reason, they reply that they left their cities to start afresh somewhere else. According to their beliefs the normal development of humanity proceeds from an original state of purity to decline. The end is marked by corruption and war. Leaving their home cities appeared to be the only solution to avoid this fate and to start afresh in a new place…
I stood at the edge of the sea and listened to the breaking of the waves. My head was empty. All of a sudden I was seized by the idea of throwing the negatives to Das unfassbare Gesicht into the sea.

Translated from the German by Colin Shepherd