Hagel’s photograph captures the serenity of a wounded environment, possibly that of a German town living out the aftermath of the Second World War. Taken from an elevated vantage point, which allows for a three fold partition within the recorded ambiance, Hagel’s camera eye records the journey of a schoolboy down familiar town steps. The vertically elongated frame enables the separation and at the same time the merging of these three distinct strata in the boy’s environment: that of the town’s roof-top panorama, almost ‘blinded’ by the morning light, then the space-in-between, populated by the carnage of some of the town’s houses, and finally, the cobblestone steps that enable the boy’s dissent, enclosed by overgrown and unattended to shrubbery.
On the one hand, the towering vantage point of the photograph’s image suggests an unfolding of a narrative that supplants rather than accentuates the narrative of depicted life. The schoolboy’s journey is only one ‘story’ within the multifarious tales that the image records. However, the way his story is being told – for instance, Hagel chooses to photograph the boy with his back turned to the camera, thus focusing on boy’s presence (movement) in time rather than his subjectivity (facial features) – connotes an intrusion in the static reality of the represented everydayness. The boy’s captured movement from a high point, with his one foot raised in front of the other as he is about to continue walking down the cobbled steps, interrupts, almost negates, the lifeless surroundings of town’s livelihood. Without trying to over-play the connotative card when reading photo-texts, we could say that Hagel’s recorded image unfurls a journey not too dissimilar to that of Dante Alighieri’s poet’s dissent into the underworld. Instead of a companion, a human guide, Hagel’s schoolboy can only rely on what is physically present on his footpath: the devastating yet compliant physicality of his immediate surroundings, framed by an intrudingly elevated vantage point.
On the other hand, the very nature of Hagel’s frame, its elongated verticality that enables a horizontal dissemination of the recorded imagery, questions the possibility of separating the narrative of the picture from the narrative of the life it records. The many visually recorded stories within the interweaving narrative threads – namely, the break of day in a quiet town recovering from the night’s destructive forces, the sunlit roof-top of the remaining church tower, the schoolboy’s solitary walk through a bereft ancient foot-path, the healing power of education that awaits him – do not dismiss the reality which they were set out to capture. Quite the contrary, the texture of these images within the greater picture that Hagel recorded so aptly reinforces the minutiae of life’s physicality; even though Hagel filters his ‘subjects’ through an elevated almost deictic vantage point, forcing them to fit his horizontally structured sense of suspended presence, the narrative they combine heightens the narrative of the life they portray. In a sense, due to the particular choice of framing and the camera’s focus, Hagel image of a boy’s school-bound journey through rummaged grounds induces a silent interchange between life lived and life represented. Consequently, the two narratives – the story behind the photographic image and the story of the photographic image – complement each other by forging a syntax of intimation, as the private moment of a boy’s journey connects with the public immediacies of a town’s life, evoking the ever-present past through little, singular instances.
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