I have always had an admiration for Didymus (twin), the
apostle Thomas who had those doubts.
He wanted to know for sure that he was seeing the real
thing. He had to touch to be certain.
These days I have been giving some thought to this touch of
real things. I have two beautifully printed (by Grant Simmons of DISC) inkjets
of the picture you see here that I took of Rebecca some years ago. On the
yellow envelope you can read that I consider it to be an icon. In its Greek
origin the meaning is resemblance. For me this slide of Rebecca is more than a
resemblance. In some way when I gaze at it is my eldest granddaughter. Holding
the slide between my thumb and forefinger makes it seem even more direct. Are
there shades of that old idea that a photograph took away a bit of a person’s
soul?
In this century, this digital century, the hard copy
photograph like journalism is on life support. Photographers get car loans to
buy cameras with extensive megapixels and then view their efforts on a monitor
screen or on their telephone.
In my past and even now I was careful to use cotton gloves
to touch my negatives. They are tactile but finger grease can lessen their
archival performance.
I have behind me and to my side as I write this seven
four-drawer filing cabinets with tons of pictures, negatives and slides. I am
doing my best to thin them out. They occupy precious space in a small oficina. On the other hand my digital friends have many
pictures, digital files stored in all kinds of backup procedures. And yet can
they hold in their hand any of these images?
I have a friend who when I show him some wonderful
photographic accident (be it digital or on film) he tells me that he can
imitate it with Photoshop. I believe him. But at the same time I think that
imitation implies seeing an original.
My argument that it would be close to impossible to imitate
the Mona Lisa if one had never known of its existence is lost on those I try to explain my idea of the tactile original. Perhaps I am
delving into philosophy. It was not only God who died (according to Time
Magazine) in the 20th century but also philosophy. That kind of
critical thinking that the ancient Greeks perhaps invented why lying under a
shady tree on a Sunny day is a lost art in a century of Netflix and Apple
phones.
And yet I could be completely wrong on the above as Plato
determined that the idea of a tree was more real than the physical tree. A practitioner
of this startling idea may have been American photographer Minor White who
enlarged on Ansel Adams’s concept of previsualization of an image. White would
look at a landscape. He would see it in his mind’s eye and then would shoot it
with his camera and process the film with the goal of seeing a physical
representation (resemblance?) of what he first saw with his mind.
All the above makes it just more difficult for me to throw
stuff.