The Missing Eye: Reviewed by Christopher J Johnson

Book Review The Missing Eye Photographs by Mattia Parodi & Piergiorgio Sorgetti Reviewed by Christopher J Johnson "It’s that time of year, when I search my mind – not my shelves – for the best books of the year. Why my mind, because books not shelved in my memory do not qualify. This is a difficult task, at once I must admit that what speaks to me grows like vines within the dark of my brainpan, while the same work may fail to sprout in others. There is no objective Good or Great or No-Brainer when it comes to art. I am not a Humian (David Hume); I don’t believe that taste is a thing one can cultivate to be correct — that kind of elitism appalls me..."

The Missing Eye. By Mattia Parodi & Piergiorgio Sorgetti.

The Missing Eye
Photographs by Mattia Parodi & Piergiorgio Sorgetti

Witty Books, 2021. 136 pp., 9¾x12¼".

It’s that time of year, when I search my mind — not my shelves — for the best books of the year. Why my mind, because books not shelved in my memory do not qualify.

This is a difficult task, at once I must admit that what speaks to me grows like vines within the dark of my brainpan, while the same work may fail to sprout in others. There is no objective Good or Great or No-Brainer when it comes to art. I am not a Humian (David Hume); I don’t believe that taste is a thing one can cultivate to be correct — that kind of elitism appalls me.

What is good to an individual falls like a pachinko ball through the pegs of our past experiences before slotting into the stillness of an ‘ah ha’ moment – this moment creates a spark that doesn’t just ignite in us, but it expands us toward others.

A great book, to my mind, must meet the criteria of any book; the two most fundamental of those criteria for me — does the work increase my capacity to love? Does it make me more humane and understanding toward others? There is a final criterion, the most difficult of all, does the work speak to the solitude of my singular experience of thought; that impenetrably dense darkness that transubstantiates into a light by which I can see more of the world and from which the world can see more of me.

So, I must pick a book from these living shelves of my continuous thoughts. This year, Raymond Molinar’s Polaroids increased my capacity to love, so did Fukase’s Sasuke and Meeks’ Somersault. How To Look Natural in Photos increased my sense of others, what they have suffered and what we must safeguard against to prevent such suffering in the future. These were Great Books all. But, very little has spoken to that solitary figure which is the thinker within me. There is one rather unassuming book, however, that increased the shape of me; The Missing Eye by Mattia Parodi & Piergiorgio Sorgetti from Witty Books. Its premise, “Recent studies published by the Cognitive Brain Research have demonstrated, using instruments that measure dream activity, that people blind since birth dream in images.”

I dream very little, though people tell me this isn’t true — that it can’t be. It may be better to say that I remember so few dreams, that those that do lodge themselves in my memory are enormous events in my stream of consciousness; sequences that cannot dissolve. 

The Missing Eye effortlessly creates the sense of a dream through its sequence of seemingly unrelated, though logically linked images. I am reminded of one of Andre Breton’s prose poems, it takes on the animus of a dream, “I took the escalator up to the meadow,” he tells us, among other things. Dreams work from a logic that is obscure to us, it’s 10% surface, 90% subconscious: the icebergs of our cerebral experience. Slideshows in which everything works by a logic of its own and which seems more natural, even, than the progression of our waking lives.

The Missing Eye screams to me, it screams in my eyes, but that’s a comfort. It brings back to me my experience of dreaming, as I wake each day blind to my nightly visions.

It also tries to increase our understanding of others, though this might be more problematic because who among those studied to bring us these findings (that the blind dream in images) can confirm this is their experience or anything remotely like it; for that matter who’s to say that any fan video for The Fall’s song Repetition isn’t a perfect stand-in for this possibility — or any number of Tarkovsky’s rolling montages throughout his films.

But, that goes back to the Humian failure. There’s no correct answer, but I’m willing to believe this is a usable approximation — a guide by which we can start a conversation. A way to bridge the gaps between experiences; those of the sighted, and those whose visual darkness is a cacophony of our other senses heightened. No map is perfect, all geography erodes. But this map may get me to the door of another’s mind; even if I need them to provide the final key for me. And, more than anything, I want to have that conversation. I want to increase my shape. I want to know your solitude as well as I know my own, and though I know it’s impossible I will extend to you my hand.

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Christopher J Johnson is the recipient of The Mountains West Poetry Series first book publication prize (2016). He has written on photobooks since 2012, and has been a bookseller since 2008. He is currently manager of photo-eye Bookstore.