Silver Tongue Devil

Everyone sees the world differently. There’s a camera, a video camera, paper and a pen in every home in the modern world and the same lay around many of the huts of the 3rd world. Those instruments more or less can function the same way. The question is, “what do you see?” I work with my hands and with them make photographs just about everyday. It iswork. It is discipline and at times dangerous. To keep the chemicals in order, to keep my silver bath at just the right strength and the PH in line, often now, to keep it at the wrong strength and the PH just out of line to get a desired result. I romanticize my exposures and lie to myself that I am like a Zen archer not aiming at a target but going through the motions over and over again, my feet black and my nose desensitized to the smell of ether. Ifool myself everyday. In fact, I would have nothing else to do in this life now as I see it.

Nothing to hold my attention as this does. I fool myself again. This is the reason that I live now. No children, no dog, a rented studio and a very old piece of glass. I ammanic. Often ecstatic over a piece and cavalier enough to pull a girl out of focus or suicidal over a creative crisis and crippled with fear that no one else will understand. NowI look for something else inside of my subjects. I’m shooting the most beautiful women in the world. Many travel around the planet and are displayed as the icons of beauty and style. More often than not in my work as of late, they may look like a faceless soul or some blur of grotesque light. I have abandoned myself to a sublime aesthetic. Astonishingly, they come back again and again to sit with me and explore this expression. To see themselves in away that no other camera sees them, in away that no other person has the insight to show or the courage to expose. Recently amodel looked at one of my photographs of another girl on my table and cried. I fool myself again and tell myself that I have found my calling. Growing up in the American west, I had heard the story of the Silver Tongue Devil. The devil whose silver tongue would smith words that would slide into your ear and you would believe every one of them. I’ve heard that this story was carried by settlers reading Shakespeare on wagon trains to the west just around the timemy lens was crafted and I’ve heard that American Indian tribes had such legends, but where ever it came from, somehow the story comes to life in the oxidized silver on my hands, in the silver blacked soles of my feet and on the metal and glass plates that I relentlessly create day after day in the cold winters or the sweaty hot summers here in my studio. The Silver Tongue Devil has shared his lie with me and gives me reason to be.

Bart Dorsa

Moscow March 2009

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