A rose is a rose is a rose

This frequently quoted sentence comes from a poem by Gertrude Stein. Wikipedia-all-knowing writes: “In that poem, the first "Rose" is the name of a person”. Maybe that's why I wanted to put this sentence at the beginning of my essay about Mira Rosa's photographs, maybe because I just met her in a café whose outdoor dining area is called "Rosengarten". Maybe it's some of her photographs that smell like the unobtrusive, lovely scent of roses, maybe it's a few of those jigsaw pieces that make up my picture of Mira as a person. We don't want to go into the depths (or shallows?) of the see your own intuition.

 

The phrase just came up in preparation for this essay, so let's just leave it as it is. Even if it doesn't seem appropriate at all: because pink isn't pink isn't pink. At least that's not my perception. She is not, or not yet, or not at this stage of her life committed, not to a specific style, not to a clear subject, not even to photography as such. She was already writing before she picked up a camera, and looking into the crystal ball doesn't say: once a photograph, always a photograph. Mira and I met in Graz, at the Academy for Applied Photography. The city, as once in my own life, way station. Mira, coming from Klagenfurt, landed in between, now soon in the northernmost north of Germany in an apprenticeship for industrial design. Mira and I didn't know each other at all - too many students at the academy at the same time.

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 We don't want to look into the depths (or shoals?) of your own intuition here. The phrase just came up in preparation for this essay, so let's just leave it as it is. Even if it doesn't seem appropriate at all: because pink isn't pink isn't pink. At least that's not my perception. She is not, or not yet, or not at this stage of her life committed, not to a specific style, not to a clear subject, not even to photography as such. She was already writing before she picked up a camera, and looking into the crystal ball doesn't say: once a photograph, always a photograph. Mira and I met in Graz, at the Academy for Applied Photography. The city, as once in my own life, way station. Mira, coming from Klagenfurt, landed in between, now soon in the northernmost north of Germany in an apprenticeship for industrial design. Mira and I didn't know each other at all - too many students at the academy at the same time. And I didn't really like the first photo (or let's be more precise: the first crop of the first photo) I saw of her. We both exhibited in the same group show and said excerpt was part of the invitation poster. Oh, I guess I'm just too old for nose piercings!

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Then, without being able to assign them to a specific person, I saw those photos that to me could represent the scent of roses: self-portraits in a quiet, stylish hotel room; a young woman, present and absent at the same time, delicate, transparent, erotic, unobtrusive. I didn't have glasses, so I couldn't read who the pictures were from. Yes, those were special pictures. At the top I saw the photo for the "detail" - a completely different world, which I could easily assign to the right person, even without glasses, since I was hanging up my own pictures in the same room. Pars wasn't pro toto, the "whole" photos had a different effect on me. One word (not the only one): courage. Photographs from a world that I did not associate with the ones exhibited below that I saw earlier. The worlds are too different. Like I said: Mira isn't Mira, etc.