The Gryphons of Paris: A Reliquary of Photographs & Vignettes
Ronald Hurwitz
American concert
violist Ronald Hurwitz brings his emotional tuning to bear on the visual world
in Gryphons of Paris, the premier publication from Voirin Editions. Hurwitz’s
work has taken a place in important Parisian collections including the Bibliothèque
Nationale, Musée Carnavalet, and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie;
that feat confers upon him an artistic citizenship of which this beautiful book
is the fruition. Since 1979 he has been a frequent traveler to the French capitol
and to Vienna, international cities whose physical culture remains shaped by
the prodigious growth of their power in the Nineteenth Century. Though Parisian
life was transformed by the architectural autocracy of Baron Haussman in that
period, the contemporaneous advent of photography provided the new Paris with
an authenticating self-image. So its urban landscape remains permanently haunted
by the visions of Eugene Atget, Édouard Baldus, Nadar, and the other giants
of the medium’s first phase.
When an American
artist like Hurwitz turns his lens on the rue François Ier, the avenue
Lédru-Rollin, the quai Voltaire, he repeats the originary labor of those
pioneers while rotating it toward a modernity whose chronic nostalgia they could
not have predicted. An imaginative daguerrotypist might anticipate the eventual
rise of color photography, but not our aesthetic retrenchment upon monochrome
that shows no sign of abatement. Every "black and white" photograph
is a genealogy of the present, a grasp toward the Nineteenth Century’s departed
shades, the human and the monumental. Like Odysseus in the underworld, whose
warm hands pass right through the cold ghost of his mother, photographers of
the modern city are mourners for a past they never saw. Hurwitz calls; Gryphons
of Paris a Lundi, 21 mars 1988 "reliquary."
If the past is
black and white, black and white is the past. Any American citizen who makes
the eastward crossing over the Atlantic is in some sense a pilgrim returning
to the Old World; Hurwitz’s three-decade career as a classical violist makes
his voyages to the European capitols resonate with this sense of homecoming.
The photographs of Gryphons of Paris are those of a traveler, but they read like
those of a lifelong resident. They open to us as invitations, subtly suggesting
that we, too, can be at home here if only we will venture to identify with the
heartbreakingly ephemeral beauty of its dark weather and eroding stone facades.
In a similar way, indoor pictures like the desk-scape "Lundi 21 Mars 1988"
evoke a form of life that will soon be as irretrievable as those buildings that
fell under the onslaught of Haussmanization a hundred years ago. The photo’s
title is the date of a single day that will never come again; its morning Figaro
bears the partially legible headline "questions… socialiste" —
questions which have since disappeared, not least because of the Soviet collapse
which was only one year away at the time of this exposure. Even the paper-clipped
handful of French money has since been replaced by the euro. Both architecturally
and existentially, then. whatever still stands, stands for what could not stand.
Gryphons of Paris has been composed in lead type and printed and bound by hand.
The portfolio of 33 photographs has been reproduced as duotone stochastic lithographs,
printed on Utopia paper and varnished. The volume has been quarter bound in black
Canapetta book cloth with French marble paper over boards. The book measures
6 x 9 inches; 64 pages. Limited to an edition of 200, signed by the artist.
Deluxe Edition – Twenty-six books, lettered A to Z, are accompanied by an
original, signed platinum/palladium print presented in a folio. Book and folio
are housed in an opulent gold papered slipcase.
