Peter Angelo Simon: Circus Dreams

Acrobats, aerialists, wire walkers and other circus dazzlers pit their romantic ideas of spectacle against the harsh realities of physics. With their bodies and their extra-normal senses they appear to defy the known laws.

I was riding in a pickup truck sometime in the late 70's with the master Russian acrobat and teacher Gregory Fedin when he revealed to me how they do it. I know exactly what he said because my tape recorder was running at the time:

"Would you like to know our great secret? We do not see acrobat, we see space. There's no difference between space and acrobat because we are absolutely dissolved in the space of the universe."

"And if you are able to see space, the acrobat has to go through it, go with the curves, like the tracks of a railway. When he does not fit the curves of space he's not a good acrobat. If he follows the lines correctly, he's a good acrobat, he fits in. The curves of space are the rails for the acrobatic tricks."

I may have sensed this but as someone who understands things visually I longed to see it. At least I wanted to study the effects of these lightning-fast feats on film. Years earlier Ernst Haas' sublime slow-speed color bullfight photographs had lodged in me. I experimented with slow motion, automatically varying the timing of exposures of flying acrobats. But the results proved unsatisfying.

In December 2003, I went to the circus again. This time I jumped into it with instinct alone. On some slides peak performance moments were nailed with clarity and sharpness. On others the colors and movement were painted, smeared or blurred in ways which defined complex continuous motion invisible to the naked eye. I felt these images revealed something profound and exquisite about the dreaming, daring and grace of these artists.

Now I presumed to join the action. Using computer software I worked with the peak moments as captured on my film. The digital system presents unlimited possibilities for affecting pictures from extreme subtlety to total transformation. The molecules of this realm are tiny squares of solid color in millions of shades, usually embedded invisibly in the finished picture. Here was an opportunity for a transaction between our technology and the ancient performing art form. With it I could slip the bonds of realistic detail and color as I wished. At work in this visual field I explored countless paths of possibilities for each image, guided by a peculiar feeling in my skin when on a promising track. Some of the new pictures seemed to suggest the underlying speed and eccentricity of particle physics. Some echoed the language of painting. Some seemed haunted by a feeling of insubstantiality. Others were joyous.

And they seemed to say that we are all absolutely dissolved in the space of the universe.

Peter Angelo Simon
New York City, February 2005

I first saw Peter Angelo Simon's photography in his 1978 book Big Apple Circus, a book on which with text and photographs he documented the birth and early development of the then recently formed circus. Eager to see more of his work, I visited Peter's studio with the expectation of seeing more of the kind of extraordinary documentary photographs that had impressed in the book. Instead, Peter showed me photographs of another kind altogether — photographs of things too small and events too fast for ordinary visual perception, the microscopic world of viruses, the electronic dance of subatomic particles.

Years later, in 2001, Peter and I collaborated on the making of an exhibition for the Evansville Museum in Indiana. The title of the exhibition: George Deem and Peter Angelo Simon: Paintings and Photographs in Conversation. The conversation was not between me as a painter and Peter as a photographer, but a visual; conversation between the two mediums of painting and photography. In her text for the book published under the same title in conjunction with the exhibition, Mieke Bal, Professor of the Theory of Literature at the University of Amsterdam, distinguishes between the continuum of painting and the photographic instant. Paraphrasing Bal's argument in her own words,

"The instant is what painting cannot communicate … the moment of actuality between the infinitesimal instants that build up painting's continuum. Actuality is what the continuum of painting cannot grasp, only embody … This is the photographer's proposition about his own medium — the temporal inflection of detail. The painterly version of the watch stopped. Actuality and continuum become one."

Peter Angelo Simon's photographs are about his own medium of photography, and they define the extent and nature of his contribution to that art.

George Deem
New York City, December 2004

Beyond Gravity