SERAFIN GERBER ON RYAN MCGINLEY & FERDINAND HODLER

Ryan McGinley, Sparky.

Afterimage by Serafin Gerber:

I am on a journey to find the image in my head. I haven't reached the bottom, but I'm on it. I took the assignment literally: what's the image you see when you close your eyes? So I lay down, closed my eyes, and looked. Not one image came, but many.

I'm a melancholic person, especially in summer (I’m writing this in July); every new one makes me feel time passing, and I think of past summers, miss what has been. The older I get, the more I think: I used to be so young, so free, everything felt light, endless, limitless. Now it all feels heavier, more serious. This feeling hits me every summer.

There's a contrast in it. On one side I'm fully present, swimming in a river under this exact sun, hyper-real, right here, right now. But then it layers with every summer before it. It results in this sort of mental time travel, this longing for what has been, this slight fear of what's coming. The very moment becomes a timeline. Saturated, both ways at once.

I grew up in the countryside, so visually summer to me means saturated colour, late evening light lying horizontal and warm, fields, meadows, the wind in them, rivers, hills, mountains.

I have this ritual I do every time I swim: I dive, open my eyes underwater, and swim toward the sun looking straight at it, watching the light break. Full steam summer evening light, running super fast, close friends, warm beer—this is where freedom lives, where everything feels possible. Wide space, the sky, closeness, intimacy, melancholy.

Three images came out of it, layered.

The most photographic one is Ryan McGinley's early work—fireworks, figures shot against the sun. It's the same gesture: looking into the sun through water, that closeness, that youth. His images breathe. Everything is here at once. I found his work years ago, forgot about it, and it came back to me while I was trying to name this feeling—the wide lens, people close together, fireworks or sun, small flares of light. Not many photographs move me the way his do.

Ferdinand Hodler, Sonnenuntergang auf dem Genfer See, 1915.

The second is Ferdinand Hodler, a Swiss painter—lakes, forests, streams, rocks, his light. Figures holding each other by the hand. I can't name one painting; it's the colour and the light matching what I feel, not any single image.

The third is the sunrise emoji. I use it constantly. A small square that is also an image.

These three layer into what I see right now when I close my eyes. Together, they are my inner world right now. Not a concise answer to a simple question. The word for it might be saudade—the presence of an absence. Longing for something that isn't here now.

Afterimage is an ekphrastic series exploring that one image you see when you close your eyes—the one that lingers in your mind. We invite different people to reflect on an image they can't shake. The column began during our time publishing the journal Objektiv and continues today under Objektiv Press.