“One might be rash enough to conclude that a man has to be at home in some kind of jail in order to become a poet,” mused Tonio Kröger. But who isn’t in some kind of jail? “Whether enforced by nature—biologic or social, tangible or abstract,” as C. Fausto Cabrera observes, “we all confront the parameters of our cage eventually. What we do when we reach those bars helps define us, huh.” The body itself confines us. Think of Solomon ibn Gabirol’s cry, nearly a thousand years ago: “Just see your servant’s suffering and misery. / Just see his soul, a vulture in a trap.” But Cabrera is more constrained than most. The Parameters of Our Cage consists of a correspondence launched in January 2020 from his cell in the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Rush City with the renowned Minneapolis-based photographer Alec Soth; the last letter included, from Soth to Cabrera, is dated August 24—amazing for a book published in October. On both sides, the writing is loose and informal, with no apparent intent to craft prose or prepare a text for publication, but it amounts to a deep exploration of the sources of art in human vulnerability. Soth, not entirely comfortably, takes on a role as teacher to his correspondent, perhaps recognizing, as the reader does, that Cabrera does not really need a tutor, but that the fiction of this kind of relation would be the most evident way of conducting the exchange. Early on, trying to understand Cabrera’s feeling about photography, Soth challenges him to describe his eight “desert island” photographs. One would be a picture of Cabrera’s mother, who died when he was twelve—"the only way I could hear my mom’s laugh from in here.” The second is another family photo. The rest, Cabrera says at first, would be porn—then takes it back, a bit, saying he means pictures that “rely on a female presence.” Beyond those first two, he chooses, not existing images—like one of Soth’s choices, which would also be one of mine, Ed van der Elsken’s Après-ski, 1967—but rather imaginary photographs featuring stars like Lana Del Rey or Demi Lovato or Suicide Girls models; women, he thinks, “who hold a certain darkness within that I instantly related to,” giving the illusion of a “personal connection pulling me into those eyes staring into my desiccated soul.” Finally, he changes his mind about the last two: enough female portraits, but rather a crowd of strangers, perhaps in a bar or at a demonstration—in any case the opposite of his current isolation (“Everyone will know what I mean when the pandemic settles”)—and a shot of his cell at a previous prison facility where the parameters were somewhat wider than in his present one, which he imagines as “a testament to my existence…. Getting out isn’t the end of my prison sentence; it’s the beginning of my true redemption. My supposed debt to society in a cage doesn’t account for my debt to humanity.” There’s more to those lines than I can unpack in the parameters I’ve imposed on my space for writing here, but what’s profound is the implied sense of the imaginary nature of any photograph—even if we want its subject to be real (which implies the imaginary nature of the real in turn). Perhaps the book’s essential contrast is between a man who feels and is caged and wants to reach out beyond it, and one who needs to construct a protective framework around himself in order to move more adventurously through the world. “It’s like I’m a deep-sea diver in one of those old-fashioned diving suits,” writes Soth. “I drive around in the bubble of my minivan looking for treasure.” He compares himself to one of those hikikomori, Japanese recluses who never leave their room. Of course, etymologically, a camera is that room. The eye is a bubble.
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C. Fausto Cabrera and Alec Soth, The Parameters of Our Cage, is published by Mack, London, 2020.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.