Chodorov does not “capture” moments, he builds them into a sequence of time and place. In his view, photography is a strategic act of architectural construction, in which each piece is composed of hundreds and sometimes thousands of separate photographs, just like the fragments of which contemporary reality is composed. Each individual photograph is a kind of “pixel” that becomes a philosophical atom in a larger structure, similar to a historical mosaic, that gives the whole a power greater than the sum of its parts. The connection between Chodorov’s work and that of the great Renaissance artists is also not coincidental. In 1553, Ascanio Condivi published an official and approved biography of Michelangelo’s life, written under the full supervision of the maestro himself, and largely based on his direct words. In that text, Condivi claimed that Michelangelo had grown up in a house of stonemasons (scarpellino) and thus absorbed his love of the chisel along with his wet nurse’s milk. As a sculptor-painter, Michelangelo combined, in his work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, separate narratives – from the Creation to the Great Flood, as well as images of other biblical figures – into a balanced spiritual experience of space and spirit. One strong example of this is his portrayal of the figure of the prophet Jonah; Michelangelo used a sharp perspective to “break” the physical confinement of the curved ceiling, to break through the boundaries of the standard two-dimensional frame, and to create a space in which the multiplicity of details no longer “confuses” the viewer’s perception, and instead only intensifies the perception that the viewer is looking at the truth.
Speaking metaphorically, it can be said that Chodorov, as a “digital stonemason”, extracts the image from mountains of visual information with surgical precision; he uses wholeness as someone who “paves” reality with mosaic pieces; the idea of a mosaic – the assembly of a multi-meaning whole from single, separate sections – has become a powerful philosophical metaphor in Western thought, one that appears in antiquity as well. There is something paradoxical about the mosaic: the artist is seemingly limited to a finite number of pieces that has the ability to restrict the artist’s freedom to create. But in the context of a mosaic’s actual creation, it produces an unexpected wealth of shades, movement, and the illusion of depth. It is precisely the reduction to a finite number of “building blocks” that gives the mosaic its flexibility: the ability to “move a single stone,” and to give it a new meaning within the overall context, makes the medium surprisingly flexible and versatile. It is no coincidence, then, that thinkers in all generations, and especially in the ancient world, saw the world itself as a kind of cosmos-mosaic: a tapestry of seemingly separate parts – events, people, destinies – which ultimately make up a harmonious and deliberate cosmic pattern (logos), even if from the individual point of view, the overall pattern is not visible. Similarly, memory and history themselves can also be seen as a mosaic: just as the physical mosaic is usually preserved in only partial fragments and still gives us a true picture, so too our knowledge of the world is a kind of “mosaic” of its own: fragments of testimonies, partial texts, from which we try – carefully and meticulously – to reconstruct a complete picture.