“The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.”
That’s what Mark Rothko said in 1965 about the colorfield work he’s most famous for, an insistence on a “meaning” behind the “abstraction” that his son, Christopher, has reiterated in interviews about the major exhibit he co-curated in Florence this year: “He wanted those who looked at his paintings to experience the same religious experience that he had while creating them.”
I’m no art historian and had no sense of his intentions when I encountered a Rothko in real life for the first time twenty years ago, and yet, my body reacted as though it did. I didn’t weep. But I almost did. And though much of my excitement was due to being 20 in NYC by myself, seeing names I’d read in books come to life, the Rothko pieces at the Met were the only ones that made me physically shake. I’d hoped to see them again this summer during our time in New York, but the Modern Art wing was closed.
No matter. We had a whole exhibit of his work to look forward to in Florence.
And ‘Rothko in Firenze’ at Palazzo Strozzi was not conceived as a conventional retrospective; co-curated by Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna, it set out to explore Rothko’s relationship with Florence and the Italian artistic tradition after his visit to the city in 1950. The curators’ claim isn’t that Italy transformed Rothko into an abstract painter, but that Florence offered him a tradition that gave his work added meaning. Rothko was especially captivated by Fra Angelico’s frescoes in the monks’ cells at San Marco and by the psychologically charged architecture of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library. As Geuna puts it, Florence revealed to him “a tradition in which painting and architecture converge in a contemplative dimension.”
It’s a convergence that I understand through photography. x
More often than not, the camera is treated as an enemy of contemplation. It’s seen as a means of mass distraction, a device that negates presence while promoting possession. Susan Sontag famously argued that photography can become a way of appropriating the world, turning experience into something we accumulate rather than embody. And there’s obvious truth in that.
We’ve all watched people seemingly lose their minds for the gram, moving through museums, churches, and landmarks like ink through a to-do list. Maybe we’ve done it ourselves, and like the proverbial cat that lashes out at the first thing in sight after a fright, we blame the wretched contraption that traps us in the rat race. The camera is as much an obstacle to attention as it can be its instrument.
Sontag’s read on photography is what shapes the no-cameras policy at the Rothko Chapel in Houston, which I visited two and a half years ago. Like many places of traditional worship, the Chapel asks visitors to preserve a space of silence and contemplation. And while having that policy exclude the presence of cameras sucks for someone like me, I understood and respected it while I was there. Photography is prohibited not because the paintings are especially fragile, but because the institution believes the act of photographing changes the kind of encounter taking place.
And yet, lo and behold, this year the Chapel authorized a luxury fashion campaign to be photographed inside its walls. (You may have seen my comment under the Artnet post about it.) The irony isn’t that someone broke the rules—it’s that the Chapel suspended them. And for what? To turn the work into a fashion backdrop?
What irks me is that this isn’t a contradiction at all. It’s an open admission that the Chapel’s “theology” of sacred space is little more than a thin veneer over what it truly seeks to protect: its monopoly over Rothko’s legacy through a tight grip on the circulation of images.
But no matter; water is wet, and the Pope is Catholic. So, let’s get back to cameras and their seeming antagonism to contemplation. When I raise a camera to my eye, I don’t exit the moment; I arrive in it. x
While I was at Saint Francis’ Basilica, another sacred space where cameras are not allowed, I was surprised to find a book in the gift shop called ‘Fotografare.’ I bought it despite not reading a word of Italian, and have been working through it slowly, line by line, with a dictionary in hand. I’ve (obviously) only made it a few pages in, but even that, plus some research into an artifact that seemed so out of place there, have sparked my imagination.
‘Fotografare’ is published by a Catholic press and belongs to a series of short volumes pairing artists with philosophers and theologians. Each centers on a human practice—’Cucinare’ (cooking), ‘Camminare’ (walking), ‘Scrivere’ (writing)—as a way of exploring how ordinary acts can be understood as a “rito di vivere,” or a ritual of living.
The book pairs the photographer Silvia Camporesi with the philosopher and theologian Andrea De Santis, and luckily for me, Camporesi has written and spoken extensively about the contradictions at the heart of photography. For decades, she’s focused on overlooked landscapes, abandoned spaces, and places whose meanings are at risk of being forgotten. She is especially interested in what happens when a place is brought into view i.e. how photographing something inevitably changes its relationship to the world.
Her concerns echo broader critiques of overtourism: “Travelers think they have the right to use places; even photographing a place in order to show it is an act of appropriation.” And yet, as a photographer who travels, she doesn’t simply reject the practice. Instead, she asks: “Is there a way of photographing certain places while conveying respect for them? I don’t have the answers.”
What she does know, though, is clear: “Images have consequences, always…” Every photo enters the world and changes how we encounter what it captures. The point, then, isn’t to pretend that the camera is innocent; it’s to ask what kind of relationship we’re creating from behind the lens. Camporesi may claim to lack answers, but her work suggests one; in the words of one curator, she invites us to “slow down the gaze” (rallentare lo sguardo).
What is that, then, if not contemplation? x