A Play in a Panorama

The scenery is magnificent. The scale and drama that make up the vistas of crags, crevices and clouds, breathtaking. In the midst of this, while nature timelessly endures, Bashir Borlakov stages momentary acts, or as he describes them 'sentences' in history that are then forever locked into the memory of an otherwise perfect landscape.

In Panorama 7, seven men, mere dots in a vast mountainous range, pull determinedly on a rope. Whether they are rescuing someone, lowering one of their number, or pulling a hidden load is unclear. This could easily be a scene from a film, in which the result of the seven men's endeavours might appear in the next frame, but Borlakov captures them still in their act and so the sentence they begin to write remains open.

There are six other images in Borlakov's Panorama series. Although they are all shot in the Caucasus Mountain Range, in Russia close to the Georgian border, the composition of the land is strikingly different in each photograph, as are the human acts these backdrops both conceal and reveal. In the furthermost left corner of the first image is a scene so small that it can be easily overlooked, but when noticed, it evokes a pang of concern as two men are seen bending down in a meadow battering something with a heavy rock. In another, a body appears to have been taken from the trunk of a car and is being held in an odd position dangerously close to the edge of a rock face. In the following images there are four more unusual events - a man is elevated against a perfect blue sky hanging from the legs of two flying white geese; eight women in traditional dress walk in line across a plateau; a uniformed man, assisted by another undresses, while behind him a third crouches naked in the grass; finally a group of boys stand tentatively looking over a cliff edge as if about to dive.

Photographed in a place of Greek legend - the mountains where Prometheus was chained to a rock with an eagle eating away at his liver as penance for giving man the gift of fire - myths are easily born and tales of the immortal, heroes and tortured soles infinitely cited. The term Panorama is taken from the Greek Pan horama, meaning the all-viewing, which is a perspective that it is already impossible for mere mortals to see fully unless via a constructed and often artistic creation. Adding to this lineage of spiritual observations Borlakov seems to include in his works clear references to Biblical imagery – the eight women form a line of pilgrimage, the man lifted by white birds hangs in the shape of a crucifixion and at the same time, along with the de-robing and hence metamorphosis of the uniformed guard, his freedom via flight refers to potential resurrection. The implication of these symbolic gestures can in our present day be taken to cite issues of political turmoil, corruption and racial hatred, but in the end, Borlakov's works pertain to all and none of these sources. Instead he does no more than imply at what these narratives might entail and by using the form of the panorama cleverly implicates the viewer within his composed environments. Humbled by the power of nature and unnerved by the impossibility to ascertain what is actually going on, or of what happened before and what will happen after these events, we are forced to acknowledge our suspicions and to battle with the natural urge to make judgements based on nothing more than a still image.

And so we ponder. Are these events connected? Is the body taken from the car-boot the same one that was being beaten by rocks and is later seen being pulled back from the valley by the seven boys and their rope? Should we imagine that these are horror stories of torture and murder, or are they harmless gestures that simply arouse suspicion? The tension within these images is further magnified by the Jurassic sense of time and scale that features on a grand-scale in contrast to the small interventions undertaken by mankind. And yet, even amidst these awesome sweeps of nature, the most microscopic human presence and action demands explanation. While the drama of the activities going on is somewhat belittled in the face of the much larger force of nature, the implied issue of morality in these acts is so controversial that man maintains his position as the other most dominant and erratic power to exist on earth.