What's Left
If the hot water heater hadn’t leaked and if I didn’t react by checking everything for dampness, the framed photo that leaned against a metal file cabinet for ten years wouldn’t be at Marquee Photo shop. It originally hung in my parent’s retirement condo in Miami, Florida—the first home they owned. My father used a carpet rake to clean the green and yellow wall-to-wall carpet before he vacuumed. My mother hung my paintings and photos of the family on any available wall. When my mother died I took one photo north. It is a huge photo—sixteen by twenty with a three-inch mat and a thin frame. My daughter Elyse stares at the camera, smiling and holding Snoopy , a mischievous white Bichon Frise. She’s probably eight or nine and her hair, tied back, refused to stay in place—wispy strands slipped away from the rubber band. They stay that way. I can’t brush them back.
When I checked the photo I saw the brown spots in the background, which usually means too short a time in the fixative bath. You can’t put the photo back in the fixative. The camera technician will take a digital photo of Elyse and Snoopy and print an eight by ten.
“History is perceived at the moment in which the past is petrified into an image. Orpheus’ journey from darkness to light evocatively recalls the process of printing a photograph. The image is developed in the dark room. A precise amount of time marks the journey in which it emerges from the paper, making its way to visibility like Euridyce’s ascent to reality - the return from the dead. An impatient photographer, prematurely turning on the light to see the photograph before it has been transferred from the developer to the fixative bath that protects it from the injuries of time, like Orpheus looking back over his shoulder, would cause the image to vanish.”
“Photography Versus Memory in Sigfried Kracauer's Writings on Photography”
by Meir Joel Wigoder
Flying up, getting wings and a new badge—moving from Brownie to a Junior Girl Scout in a ceremony attended by parents and scout leaders leaves an impression on a third grader. I watch a line of girls dressed in brown uniforms. Each girl’s sash displays a council identification number, troop number, and earned badges.
How did two pins, one a Brownie pin and the other a Girl Scout pin end up in my jewelry box?
In 1900 The Kodak Brownie camera made its debut. What camera did I use to photograph the line of girls walking over a small bridge? Did I still own a Baldina 35mm rangefinder camera?
A photo freezes time.
Is time an illusion?
2008©
When I checked the photo I saw the brown spots in the background, which usually means too short a time in the fixative bath. You can’t put the photo back in the fixative. The camera technician will take a digital photo of Elyse and Snoopy and print an eight by ten.
“History is perceived at the moment in which the past is petrified into an image. Orpheus’ journey from darkness to light evocatively recalls the process of printing a photograph. The image is developed in the dark room. A precise amount of time marks the journey in which it emerges from the paper, making its way to visibility like Euridyce’s ascent to reality - the return from the dead. An impatient photographer, prematurely turning on the light to see the photograph before it has been transferred from the developer to the fixative bath that protects it from the injuries of time, like Orpheus looking back over his shoulder, would cause the image to vanish.”
“Photography Versus Memory in Sigfried Kracauer's Writings on Photography”
by Meir Joel Wigoder
Flying up, getting wings and a new badge—moving from Brownie to a Junior Girl Scout in a ceremony attended by parents and scout leaders leaves an impression on a third grader. I watch a line of girls dressed in brown uniforms. Each girl’s sash displays a council identification number, troop number, and earned badges.
How did two pins, one a Brownie pin and the other a Girl Scout pin end up in my jewelry box?
In 1900 The Kodak Brownie camera made its debut. What camera did I use to photograph the line of girls walking over a small bridge? Did I still own a Baldina 35mm rangefinder camera?
A photo freezes time.
Is time an illusion?
2008©
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