John Peter Askew, Water Butt 2009

with an essay by Elena Zaytseva

“An Easy Hand”

A tiny moment in time caught, a small drop of an event. Like many other photographs by John Peter Askew, this image surprises with the contrast between the stark clarity of its structure and the rich unsettledness of its sensory chords. A blue oval on a green background, a serene surface of clean water as blue as the sky reflected in it, disturbed only by a single drop of water around which ripples are starting to form. We know that in a fraction of a second this clarity will disappear, the ripples will fill the whole circle and the picture will never be the same. Then another drop might come, and another - with short periods of calmness in between.

We can imagine the artist patiently waiting for the right moment to press the trigger - or, maybe, he was making series of quick successive shots, spending a whole reel of film to catch this particular moment? Or, maybe, the perfect picture was a matter of a serendipity  - in Russia, native to the photograph, this is called an ‘easy hand’ (legkaya ruka). Yet, whatever time and effort was invested by the artist, the picture makes us think about uncertainty and the importance of being present in the moment. To be present and to look. 

The longer we look the more we see. We see that the colour of the reflected sky fades, turning misty towards the horizon. We notice the subtle difference between the green shade of the water butt and the grass. We notice that the surface of the battered butt is incredibly tactile, we can easily evoke the feeling of touching it, we actually would like to touch it. The background is blurred, but we can see the unkempt grass of a dacha yard with its unpaved path. Suddenly we realise that what looked like a cool geometrical abstraction opens all our senses in its glorious imperfection: we feel that the water is cold, the rusty butt is warm and coarse, the path is dry and solid and the air is fresh and silent. Even the surface of the quiet blue water that looked  smooth reveals some interruptions such as little bubbles and dust

The whole picture that looked balanced and ideal suddenly turns into something imperfect and incomplete, entropy claiming its right, restrained only by the eye behind the camera, the artist’s will to keep it in place, imposing a structure that holds it all together.

“Is it not already a first element of ordered complexity, of beauty, when, on hearing a rhyme, that is to say something which is at once similar to and different from the preceding rhyme, which was prompted by it, but introduces the variety of a new idea, one is conscious of two systems overlapping each other, one intellectual, the other prosodic?”

— Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way (Le Côté de Guermantes: Vol. 3 of Remembrance of Things Past), Translated from the French by C. K. Scott Moncrieff

Since I came across this passage from ‘The Guermantes Way’ I have been fascinated with the clarity with which Proust defines beauty as ordered complexity, that invites uncertainty and chance. In fact, the artist only made one shot to make this picture, so it was a lucky strike, an ‘easy hand’.

Elena Zaytseva 

Elena Zaytseva is curator of the current Pushkin House exhibition, ‘We. Photographs from Russia 1996-2017’ by John Peter Askew.