In September 2020, I can safely and accurately define myself as being obsolete, redundant, retired and inconsequential.
But I can also add to that finality, that before it, many faced my camera. I looked at Bif’s folder today and found these. Instead of scanning the medium format (6x7cm negatives) I opted for scanning the contact sheets. I kind of like them.
I look at them and they represent that magic concept (when one looks back) of a moment in which I was too busy snapping my photographs to consider that someday, many years later, I would be looking at them and being inspired to write this short blog.
This whole year I have been fruitlessly trying to figure out that idea and not being aware of its enormity (then), (even if a small one such as Bif posing for me in the best room of that seedy Marble Arch) when looking back at it in this most present moment.
Much has been written about one’s life passing by one’s eyes at a time of an imminent accident when death seems to be in the works.
My friend George Bowering has nicely argued that a photo that I took of him was of him but not him. Would this be Bif in a past?
But there is another concept concerning time and of those moments then recorded with my camera and then years later remembering them through my archives. Some four billion years ago a couple of black holes got together and massively exploded.We know this because the noise and light has just reached our earth. I am wondering now if that event is sort of like my memory but backwards. The reality of that explosion is now something that just happened as we only now know of it. There was nobody around to record that memory of so long ago. Is this reality also a memory?