Micah Walter

When I lived in Israel a friend of mine decided that there were a few books I needed to read. So, just before I left she gave me, as a going away present, a list of essentials. One of the authors on the list that intrigued me the most was Jerzy Kosinski

photo found on Google^TM Images

Kosinski was a Jewish writer born in Poland in the 1930’s. He survived the war by living with a Catholic Polish family under a false identity and eventually reunited with his real family before emigrating to the U.S. in 1957.

When I got back to the states I ran out and bought Steps (1969) which is a short catalogue of one man’s sexual fantasies. It is an interesting thing to read and difficult to make sense of at times, but I enjoyed it in the end and found it somewhat insightful. At this point I really didn’t know much about Kosinski and so I decided to read up on the guy.

I was obviously pointed to his most famous novel, The Painted Bird (1965) which I am in the middle of reading right now, and then to his Being There (1971) which was a book the actor Peter Sellers obsessed over for a while before making it into his last movie.

But finally, while reading more about Kosinski’s life I came across his motto.

“The principle of art is to pause, not bypass. The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. This requires a moment of pause–a contract with yourself through the object you look at or the page you read. In that moment of pause, I think life expands. And really the purpose of art–for me, fiction–is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have. That is the moment of finding something which you have not known about yourself, or your environment, about others and about life.”

This was it for me. Finally I had found a writer whose take on art fell in perfect unison with my take on photography. The parallels to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment” are incredible. I can barely wait to finish reading.

More on the Mannequin connection very soon.