Nearly a decade ago, I worked for a few years at a photography museum. Photography is a medium I adore as a viewer and learner. I love hearing about the history, the arcane chemical processes. Once a conservator showed me the thin layers of a vintage gelatin print, how some gelatin produced different colors or flaws depending on the cows that provided it. The cows long dead, the subjects long dead, but both of them stopped together in time.
Maybe it’s in the blood. My late grandfather was a hobbyist street photographer with a keen eye, and some of his work clusters in frames throughout the homes of my extended family. One hangs above my kitchen table.
But I have no desire to make photographs, and I am not very good at it. My snapshots, taken casually on a very old iPhone, always seem to be wan copies of bright moments. Faded and flat, even when newly captured.
My favorite type of photography, by contrast, creates a feeling of hyperreality. It transports me to somewhere else, a vivid place beyond the possibilities of my own two eyes.
The eye is also a camera. A camera is also an eye.
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a lunchtime talk on 21st century photography drawn from The New York Public Library’s quietly extraordinary photography collection.
One of the things I like about photography is that sometimes I see a photograph and I think I would like to write something that affects someone like that photograph affects me. I see a photograph and a story opens inside me. Unlike moving images, which can sometimes insidiously influence our dialogue and pacing, a photograph does not distort narrative voice because a photograph is silent. You look at it. Sometimes something in there looks back.
Here are a few I particularly liked:
Aljana Moons 3 – Alexis Peskine
From The Belongings of the Air – Musuk Nolte
From Manon Lanjouère Les Particules project, which creates cyanotypes of plastic waste found in the ocean in the manner of Anna Atkins’ pioneering documentation of ocean plants and algae.
Other Viewing and Reading
An Arctic photographer, and one of my forever favorites.
The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams is so good.
“White Dialogues” – Bennet Sims
This story, which engages with the captured ghosts of film, is one I think about a lot.
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