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| Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena & my hands |
Because as I keep writing that I am a product of the 20th century I cannot let go of the pleasure of printing a photograph and holding it in my hand. While I had to abandon my darkroom when we moved from Kerrisdale to Kitsilano 7 years ago I have an equivalent pleasure in holding my inkjet prints as soon as they emerge from my Epson V700 printer.
I cannot understand why so many of my peers show me their pictures on their phones.
There is a tactility (and a smell, fragrance is a better word) in reading a physical book and not a digital one. I find pleasure even though I can no longer control well my fingers when I write in longhand. I miss the loud noise of typing on my grandmother’s 1920s Remington portable typewriter.
There is tactility akin to that of a shark skin in that hydrangea we had in our former garden that I can never forget.
At night when I turn off the lights my Niño and Niña get really close. I enjoy stroking their fur. Niña’s is only slightly smoother to my touch.
My friend Ralph Rinke, is an expert in cyanotypes. When I show him my versions done with Corel PaintShop Pro 12 he can tell the difference. He says that my fakes have the ink absorbed by the paper while a real cyanotype’s colours are painted on and thus are on the surface of the paper. A classic darkroom print is produced by a gelatine/silver emulsion that floats on the paper. With my current inkjets, the inks are in the paper, and not on the surface. With that out of the way, the pleasure of holding a photograph, whatever its provenance, is most real for me. Seeing van Gogh’s Starry Nights at MOMa with Rosemary in New York City is sort of the same thing. It beats seeing a high resolution image of that painting on my monitor.
Close to the tactile experience is the olfactory one. My mother would smell me behind my ear (I could feel her breath) and she would tell me I had the smell of an Englishman.
Going to the now gone Leo’s Camera on Granville included the smell (how many people are aware of this?) of all the metal cameras on display. The smell of a plastic digital camera cannot compare in my books. Holding my heavy medium format Mamiya RB-67 brings me that singular pleasure of heft and smell.
The loading of film to a camera, the little noises, the smell of the paper backing of medium format film, is another pleasure.
When I pick up film of my local and very good lab The Lab, can anything compare to getting into my car and holding the negatives or uncut slides up by the windshield? Touching them is part of the fun. Opening my Fuji X-E3 jpgs (I never shoot RAW) is not quite as much of a trip.
And I cannot finish here without pointing out how I miss my 52 years of smelling, touching and frolicking in bed with my Rosemary.
Yes, tactility!
