|
| Recent Journal Entries |
|
|
 |
Photo by Gail Harvey, no reproduction without permission
Disposable Camera Ever come across a roll of undeveloped film in a drawer, or tucked away in a box? Not because you’re a secret pornographer or clinically lazy, but because it simply didn’t make it to ye old photo shop. You’re not a real photographer, naturally, because this sort of thing would never happen to someone professionally engaged in picture taking for whatever reasons: art, commerce. This sort of film-roll floats up like flotsam, not because you had anything to hide, but that life was possibly too busy being happy for such mundane errands as having the documentation of said happiness processed. Or you’ve moved on to digital and feel “held back” by these cylindrical relics, reminders of the old days. If more life goes by and things, people and vistas have changed, you discover the roll of film and are overtaken by feelings. Curiosity: what the? A charmed little smile crosses your lips for a moment. Nostalgia, also known as a bittersweet longing for things, persons or situations of the past: who’s there? And then, if not dread, exactly, then perhaps by the slightest sensation of suspicion: what the hell is ON that roll. One could argue that if you’d been living right, nothing on the roll would surprise you; none of those eventual rectangles could harm you with a lost smile or an undetected-till-now flicker of misery in a companion’s eyes, or in your own. If you have lived right, nothing on that roll should incriminate, startle or shame you. Pragmatism enters: what if I waste my time and money having that roll developed only to find out THAT was the day the damned camera was acting up? It would be like so many small human expeditions: curiosity satisfied, money wasted, back to the other more honourable North American sources of “poor me!”
If you don’t take the damned roll of film to ye old photo shop, however, it will continue to nag at your mind. Unless of course you wrap it in old pantyhose and put it in the garbage and add it to landfill with all the other shoved-away memories of shopping trips gone wild. But then you might suffer weird, irrational dreams: what if the roll bursts, spreads like a seed, planting pictures in the earth, and someone finds them and brings them back to you at a time when you are even less ready to see them? Unless abandoned Big Mac containers are able to morph into developer and fixative, this is unlikely to happen, but still you worry about that fellow who runs the dump. What if he finds the roll and gets his friend at Ye Old Photo Shop to develop it and voila, the ONE time you took photos of your...but wait: it would be easier to just see, would it not? The old life evidenced by the same old shots of Christmas trees or some entirely boring conference which explains rather neatly why you never felt compelled [like a real photographer would have] to crack that code and see those pictures immediately, one-hour with doubles if possible.
A similar emotional ride can occur when a disposable camera emerges from a box of less-than-vital-but-still-kept items. Because a disposable camera is really just a roll of film wearing a cardboard tuxedo. Slides [well-named because they tend to fly all over, exploding from their assigned plastic cases at every opportunity] can be held to the light, squinted at. The outline of one’s grinning parents on their wedding day. My god this should be stored more carefully, you auto-admonish. Even if they did get divorced eventually. Ahh, divorce, the greatest photo-editor of them all. Who gets to keep the evidence of happiness? Who deserves this documentation, and who is more qualified to withstand the pain of it? No lawyer decides this. We’ve all seen the movie wherein one character is cut from the family photos by vengeful scissors. The keeper of the photo albums sees nothing unusual about this hostile archive: in Hollywood, they flip through it with lunatic smiles and thus we know we have someone truly wounded on our hands. Hollywood is not interested in the disappeared person unless they have committed a cinematically acceptable sin such as murder or treason. But daily, people are disappeared from the stories of their own lives in this and other related ways. If it can be seen it can be believed: only now we have a new problem: photo manipulation equipment SO easy to use even a non-photographer can seem to be capable of taking a great photo. And you, along with Auntie Lola’s triple chins, can be erased with the sweep-click of a mouse, a techno-tidying that makes the abandoned roll of film in a drawer all the more powerful. The camera of the mind is another matter. Harder to dispose of neatly: if you are human, blessed with a sound mind with a “healthy” memory, it is a merciless documentarian. It knows who was there and when and why even after the pictures are destroyed. “Develop your old films today before it's too late!” the rich basso of the Kodak spokesman from another time invites us. Why not: is seeing the worst thing can happen?
Listening to: Pascale Picard, "Smilin'"
Reading: Barnacle Love, Anthony De Sa
|
