In Print

Puppies Behind Bars

Glitterati, Inc New York 1234

Preface

LOVE DOCTORS
Draft. 3.12.07

I’m allergic to dogs. So, in the past, the relationship could only go so far.

When Chris called me from the airport to tell me about the unusual sighting of the dog in first class, his enthusiasm was infectious, as it often is. To my surprise, Chris asked me to join him, if this materialized into some kind of project. Three months later, I packed up my allergy pills, and we were off to prison.

It was the perfect weather for the quintessential first prison experience. Grey clouds, grey light. Cold. Damp. Walking up the hill to what seemed like miles of barbed wire. After predictably exhaustive security, we were escorted through several doors, with locks that rattled your knees. A reminder of where you were.

With this first impression, I only expected the experience to continue with this dark and ominous treble.

It was not what I had expected.

“The Human Condition” can parallel “The Dog Condition.” There are givers and there are takers; under-achievers and over-achievers; and there are dreamers. Some have the fortune of higher education, while some have what it takes, but can’t seem to catch a break. Some are just happy with being simple and pretty bitches.

The dogs in this program are the gifted handful who have it all, and have worked hard for it; and still, after all the success, their only interest is to give to others.

But like most pillars of society, they don’t make it to the top alone. As we know, it takes more than being simply gifted to succeed. The luck of having a brilliant teacher, who forgets teaching is a job and who invests in another with abandoned passion; this changes people. It also changes dogs.

For the dogs in this program, the inmate is the perfect teacher. For more than one year, the inmate lives with a student dog almost entirely, day and night, and the school bell never rings. The education is constant. When there are breaks from learning, it’s about playing, jumping, hugging, kissing; a recipe to make anyone a superhero. After eighteen months, the once untrained dog can turn on lights for the handicapped, see for the blind, or detect explosives to protect our cities.

Perhaps I’m influenced by this cynical time, but I hesitate to use the mistreated word, Love, but it would be inauthentic to avoid it. The dogs in this program are healers, “Love Doctors.” There are probably a number of ingredients required for a person to end up behind bars, but one most certainly is the absence of love. These dogs come into prison with only love to give, and in exchange, all they ask is time, something inmates have in abundance.

Unconditional love changes people, and manifests itself in finding purpose, hope, self-respect, and connection to others. Perhaps, this is the most potent force to reform or transform anyone. Like a parent basking in the glory of their successful child, for the inmate, they say good-buy to their success story, and send it off into the world to be a contributor; the dog, a messenger for redemption.

Paul Solberg, New York City

05 October 2007

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PAUL SOLBERG: THE ESSENTIAL BEAUTY OF THINGS

Photography, whether professional, artistic, documentary, or amateur, reveals the world to us. Never before has the subject been perceived as it is after being photographed, captured for posterity at a precise moment in history, under a certain light and with a specific framing.

There are certain photographers who, in their gaze and personal way of understanding photography, strive to create other worlds where object and author are imbricated in a way that allows both to be fruitful and multiply, giving rise to a creative act. Others, under the pretext of that same quest for authorship, use the object of their work merely to deploy a preconceived vision of that which has caught their eye. They take what exists and twist it to suit their own interests, with the aim—often vain and trivial—of transforming it, laying claim to it, divesting it of all or part of its essence in a kind of vampirical act where the object is pushed into the background while the sole author hogs the limelight. This act of creative hubris is rarely found in combination with virtue, but when it is, we find ourselves before a masterpiece, a creation inextricably bound to its creator, and in it we recognize the genius of one who has managed to enter into a kind of positive communion with the objects, landscapes, or people he or she finds interesting. In short, we find ourselves facing the work of an artist.

Yet there are other roads by which a few privileged artists manage to show us other worlds—realms of greater intimacy, precision, and truth. Those who travel such paths have a very different point of departure, which consists in shedding all prejudices and all preconceived intentions other than the determination to discover the essence of the object before their eyes. It is an exercise in letting go, like those masters of Zen philosophy who discover the true nature of the very act of thinking by emptying their minds of thought. In this way, each image they manage to produce becomes in itself an act of thinking, where nothing is wanting and nothing is superfluous. They attain that quasi-mystical state where objects and beings reveal their true essence, that which contains them entirely and makes them unique: not because they are intrinsically unique, nor because their initial appearance powerfully captures our attention at first glance, on first impression, but because someone—the photographer's eye—has been able to reveal to us, the surprised spectators, what makes them unique and universal in our eyes, to our understanding.

It is in this less obvious, more complex territory that Paul Solberg works, searching for something the rest of us are incapable of seeing or finding even when we seek it with dogged determination. To paraphrase Picasso, we might say that Solberg belongs to a class of artists who "do not seek, but find." It is no easy task, and most are not up to the challenge; only those who have flushed all accoutrements and superfluous temptations from their eyes can offer us an essential vision of the world, one in which we viewers recognize ourselves in a different way, transformed by the powerful, subtle gaze of the other, the author, who has worked the miracle of unveiling our own mystery, the mystery that alien enigmas hold for our eyes only.

When I observe Paul Solberg's images carefully, what I find surprising is not his often poignantly familiar motifs but that essential way he has of approaching them: he seems bound and determined to show them with absolute frankness, as if each image he presents to us were the only one possible. Once we have seen them, we cannot imagine them any other way. The artist's frankness leads to another reflection on the contemporary quality of photography and its possible fate, as an image that may or may not stand the test of time. Photographic images often betray, intentionally or unintentionally, the historical period in which they were taken, and in many cases—the majority, in fact—this betrayal makes them victims of the passing years. They will undoubtedly be useful for telling us what the world was like at a given historical moment; however, in such cases they will have survived by virtue of their documentary value, not the timelessness that every work of art aspires to achieve in order to make the passage of time its best ally rather than its worst enemy. In most of Solberg's images, we can detect that aura of timelessness which ensures that in the future they will retain all their freshness and suggestive power, and his work's promising future is precisely what also makes it more present.

José Guirao

Madrid, January 2015

15 October 2015