Below is a paper I wrote for a class called “Works of Art” at Columbia University in their Narrative Medicine program in the summer of 2023. It was taught by the incredible Rika Burnham.

“Regensburg” by Seiichi Furuya as seen and photographed on my phone at the Met, summer 2023.

The Intervention of Art: Catharsis, Connection, and Transcendence

The assignment as I interpreted it was to get pleasurably lost in the Met in search of some captivating work I may or may not be familiar with that I would write about. As an institution, The Metropolitan Museum of Art is in my mind- as it certainly is for many- a primary place of worship for art. It is a place that, even though I may not visit enough, I’m always comforted to know is nearby. Like a daydream of homework, I felt I could fulfill this direction.

As I roamed the halls and bounced off my old preferences, I tried to outsmart my intuition. There was a game afoot, deeply nested, to best my Self in a quest for discovery, novelty, education, and transcendence. I wasn’t looking for something to complete an assignment. I wasn’t seeking approval or trying to please a set of criteria. I was searching for something that felt like home.

The first few selections were predictable. I was drawn in by dramatic renderings of mythical scenes and projections of divinity splashing across the stylistic spectrum of history. I was dazzled but ultimately these first contenders fell away in a natural process of elimination. In the Japanese wing off a hallway from another hallway connected to a gallery and three 0ther hallways, I entered a liminal state. I saw a tower of lights glowing with synesthetic warmth out of a cold shadowy dark. “East Berlin” lit a string of Christmas lights in my chest and stopped me as I walked. I could feel the winter wind from the opposite sidewalk as I looked up at the building.

Eventually, like the photographer may have on that sidewalk opposite that building in that cold air, I felt it was necessary to keep walking. I only made it a few paces before I was faced with true liminality. Black and white, could be an illustration, orderly but asymmetrical, sharp in its detail and soft in its first impressions; I stepped out from the sidewalks of East Berlin and into “Regensburg”.

Who were these presumably important men immortalized in stone staring out at me? What temple did their combined visages rest in? Who were the faceless people looking at the busts on the wall? What did it matter? Was this not itself already a complete circle and commentary on us looking at art and history as art and history are looking back at us? (And with what appears to be great judgement.) What does it matter who these men were? The whiteness and maleness of their faces recedes into the monotone of much of what we’d expect. Let’s say for now that this one advanced our understanding of math and science, and that this one was a ruthless landowner who exploited the labor of his community and hid his misdeeds behind a veil of “philanthropy”.

I cannot see the faces of the people looking at the busts. Why not? There are actually no living human faces in the scene. I see the backs of four heads and the baby carriage. What is in the baby carriage?

Isolation emerges as I realize the “people” in the scene could turn around and be lizard monsters. They could be aliens. They could be ghosts or hallucinations. Are they truly there? I looked at the placard beside this photo. It said precious little. “Regensberg, 1988, Gelatin Silver Print”. It is a photo. There was some doubt. The mystery deepened. As I looked around it was not immediately apparent who the artist was and where I could find that information. That night at home, searching the internet with the limited data I had and considering it against the other contenders, I was at least able to identify the photograph’s creator as Seiichi Furuya.

None of us can retrieve that innocence before all theory when art knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.

-Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays

We were encouraged first to look without knowing. The class acknowledged the priceless moment that is often not available when we have no context or compass for what we’re supposed to be seeing in a work of art. With that permission, I took my time before knowing too much. In my slight initial research, I focused on identifying the location in the photo. I searched for museums and memorials in the Regensburg area and came up with The Walhalla memorial. From Wikipedia: “The Walhalla memorial is named for the Valhǫll of Norse Paganism. It was conceived in 1807 by Crown Prince Ludwig I of Bavaria in order to support the gathering momentum for the unification of the German States into the German Empire.” A neoclassical monument with glorious gravitas, its design was inspired by the Parthenon. A Japanese photographer took the photo in Germany in 1988, a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Looking at the image with a classmate their questions began with the assumption that the scene was choreographed. It hadn’t occurred to me yet. If it was, there was presumably some message or intention behind the composition. There had to be a reason in the artist’s mind for all of it. He chose which faces to feature, why the light shines down in just the way it does, and the placement of the camera in the room. “Close reading” the photo in the spirit of Narrative Medicine, I noticed the mother’s head and her baby directly under the foot of the angel. Is she walking on her? Is she a guardian angel of Temperance as I originally thought, or is she stepping on the heads of those that cross her path?

The wall behind the stone heads reads to me as water. I know it’s not, but I see rippling water from a birds’ eye view as salt and foam emerge in the tides of my subconscious. The head of the man in the center is split by the bust above him. The woman behind him (furthest to the left) appears mesmerized and in conversation with the one face on the wall that is turning into the light as if looking directly at her. What are they exchanging, those two? What magic are they on about? What is in the baby carriage??

Narrative Medicine utilizes “Close Reading” within a dynamic process of attention, representation, and affiliation. Through the lens of healthcare and devoted to the relationships between caregivers and care-receivers, attention is given and received in dialogue, representation is in the communication itself both verbal and nonverbal, and affiliation happens in the living connections shared through knowledge, training, intuition, and skill. These three values move together in a flowing process. It is not static. It’s happening.

The photo is part of a group exhibition at The Met called “Anxiety and Hope in Japanese Art”. Neither hope or anxiety come to mind immediately as emotions in “Regensburg”. I see an eerie calm with a solemn veneer and an undercurrent of class warfare. There’s some repressed catharsis beneath the stillness of the image, but it is offscreen. I saw for a moment the 20th century’s history of imperialism summarized in this singular shot. The feeling within it is a fertile void. There is no particular emotion but it’s not neutral. Nothing is either accepted or rejected here. Our love and hate are reviewed and evaluated in equal weight.

Close reading the internet I noticed the photographer is still alive, there was nothing in particular about the making of the photo, and there’s a website with his collected work and publications. For a few consecutive weeks, I visited the photo. In a case of too close reading, it took me multiple visits to zoom out and find the placard a few steps away offering visitors actual information about the set of seven photos by this photographer included in the exhibit. Reading it I was somewhat stunned at the amount of information offered on the small surface. It wasn’t about where he went to school or the movement he belonged to. In just a few sentences I knew more about his life than I thought possible. And for everything I discovered, I had three more questions. It read:

古屋誠一撮影

Furuya Seichi (b. 1950)

Memoires 1998 lIlI

Heisei period (1989-2019), 1998

Seven chromogenic and gelatin silver prints

Photographer Furuya Seichi moved to the Austrian city of Graz in the mid-1970s, where he met and fell in love with Christine Gössler, a student and aspiring actress. The two married in 1980, and Christine gave birth to a son in 1981. On October 7, 1985, Christine took her own life by jumping from a building in East Berlin after a protracted battle with schizophrenia. Her life and death have remained the focus of Furuya's work. The seven photographs of this set were taken in Austria, Germany, and Japan before and after Christine's tragic death.

II.

It had not yet occurred to me that the photo could be about grief. The image could be filled with pain; the cost of greatness, the shadow side of history and genius, the abuse and suffering we forget or ignore… The image is filled with the absence of life. It expresses the vacuum of grief. The rock faces in their cold hard expressions offer no solace I can see. And the people passing by… They may be the dead or the living left behind who have become ghosts in their own lives. Death steals faces from us. We no longer get to take for granted the living form and its unique squints and smirks. The faces begin to fade immediately and forever. This photo was taken three years after Christine died.

The photo says: “There is a silence equal to the loudness with which this architecture speaks for what it represents. It’s quiet may not be a restful sleep, but a muffled plea. Shock, anger, sadness, bargaining, and acceptance are the five stages as psychology presents them. They are not a line. They are a circle. Every grief is as unique as the relationship it belongs to.”

The more I learned about the photographer, the more I learned about his marriage, his partner, their family, the tragedy, and their artistry. Where I’d at one time noticed him associated with words like “exile”, with empathy I was now seeing a man incredibly open about a subject that is terribly difficult to talk about, and even more difficult to survive and live with.

The website for his work has a contact page with a street address, phone number, and email. The sheer number of ways to get in touch feels like an invitation to connect.

I began to write:

To: Seiichi Furuya, or the kind individual that receives these emails

From: Daniel Ryan, Columbia University, Narrative Medicine

In crafting the email, I wanted to first express my admiration for the work and provide context for my writing. The question that I felt could unlock the most information in the making of the image regarded its staging or spontaneity. If I ever heard back from anybody, and they knew that much, that would at least tell me something of the artist’s intention. The more I looked at the photo however, the more I was convinced that its’ spontaneity was impossible. I was sensing too much meaning and intention behind what was in my imagination.

After introducing myself and my purpose in writing him, I asked,

“Was the image choreographed or spontaneously captured?”

I wrapped it up and proofread it a couple times. I hit send. I didn’t imagine I’d hear back. And then a few hours later…

“Dear Daniel J Ryan,

Thank you for your email.”

I’d spent more time in the Met with my class in the last 6 weeks than I had in twenty years of living in NYC. Bonding with everyone, it was transformative in unexpected ways sitting with my new friends and Vermeer, Bonnard, Kerry James Marshal, and the others. I never thought for one moment those artists would ever hear my pithy opinions or self-conscious commentaries. One doesn’t imagine these things will happen through a routine awareness of boundaries, access, and mortality. And then there are other principles governing the universe. Principles about effort, action, and what doesn’t happen if we never try.

“I took this photo in 1988, when I was on my way back from Frankfurt to Graz, attracted by the huge, pure white neoclassical building towering behind the Danube, and visited it without knowing what it was.

Those who know a bit about German history will recognize that many of the busts lined up there are of famous historical figures. I think I spontaneously took one or two photos, so-called snapshots, which were taken immediately, and none of the people present realized that I had taken them.

Even a few years after I took the pictures, they still held a certain fascination for me, so decades ago I did a little more research and found out the origin of the building and the bust.”

I was shocked and delighted! Not only had I received a response, but he generously included a link to the Walhalla Memorial alongside his revealing anecdote. “One or two snapshots”!? The photo now burst with colors in my mind shedding its black and white chrysalis and becoming a new being with stained glass wings. “I think I spontaneously took one or two photos”. It wasn’t composed or choreographed. It was a lark.

I crafted a response politely expressing my gratitude and amazement. I wrote:

“So, it was a "snapshot" among one or two?? Unchoreographed? Amazing. …To my eyes, looking at the photo there's been a gravity and intentionality in the seriousness of the busts, the absence of faces among the people, and the black and white shadows and light. It didn't feel staged, but it did feel somehow chosen. … Now I see a meditation on chance.”

What is the word for the confluence of forces here? In English or any other language? How was I now having this Sistine Chapel-like moment of connection emerging from within the nexus of this work of art, its’ creator, myself, and some other unfolding play I can’t clearly identify but feel happening around us?

Then he said:

“Dear Daniel,

I have now searched for the negative film to find out if I really took two snapshots in a row (with a slight pause) at that time. And I have scanned the film to complete the picture to prove the fact.

I am sending you this photo for your reference.”

III.

There are only two paths open to those who must witness suffering: (1) pretend it is something else—predictable, resectable, eventually curable, spiritually enhancing, the thing that happens to others—or (2) see it fully and endure the sequelae of having seen.

-Rita Charon, “To See the Suffering” Academic Medicine, Vol. 92, No. 12

In the first email sent to me by the photographer, Seiichi Furuya, he began,

“Your inquiry has once again brought home to me how wonderful the medium of photography is. I am convinced that somewhere in the world my photograph will leave an impression on someone that transcends time and space, just as I felt when I took it.”

Transcends. I’m so glad he used that word. I couldn’t agree more. By its definition, our models for interacting with the world and each other expand beyond their previously known order. I thought I knew what the museum was. It turns out there are not just works of art inside those frames. Our people are on the other side, even if we can’t see their faces.