Photographs are too precious to exist. They are so expendable that we toss them aside in mosques shaped like photo albums. They become that which is most missed, yet we cannot remember their names. Photographs are those insignificant moments that connect us backwards and map our existence on this stage of hyper contextualization. We move forward on this ever-expanding stage where, with increasing rapidity, we sever the chord of memory and analog connection. Our loss becomes great while our hearts and minds become callous and distant.
(We should all take a moment and remember Roland Barthes and his “Camera Lucinda”, his beautiful and poetically semiotic contemplation about the meaning of a photograph. A man steeped in the deconstruction of language and meaning, a ban saw that cut through the façade of social narrative. But here faced with a photograph of his mother who had recently passed away he had to stop and try to render a clear “image” out of the perplexing vocabulary of “the photographic.”)
The backs of photographs are beautiful. Each one of them inscribed like a well-traveled FED EX package. Every one marked, dated and sent from different locations and arriving in one. There is something about the transition of the mass produced blank mirrors (unexposed photographic paper) to this personally transcribed and imbued object. Each one marked, not only with the image burned with light, but also the crudely cut sides that enable the picture to fit into a store bought frame. The date and stamp from the processor of the image, or the hand written script on the back that ranges from simple ontological references like the names of who is in the frame, the date, and perhaps the location, to a lovely sentiment wishing someone was there. Go, and dig through the historical detritus that is your life and you will find a proverbial longitude and latitude of coordinates that locate you or your loved ones in any particular moment in time.
Even the most transient and systemic images such as those school photos of yourself or others that were handed out like carte-de-viste’s of old showing our presence in a temporal map of a certain world. How each one of them is inscribed with a personal note of some sort restricted to a physical space of 2 ½ x 3 ½ inches. These vessels are the carriers of older photographic gestures and the precursor to the hyper- limited sentiment or ubiquitous statements found in modern practices like Facebook updates or Tweets. We should not move forward without knowing where we have been. So before you toss aside those pieces of paper, bad haircut or clothing style alike remember the power of their preciousness.
