The ultimate wisdom of the photographic image is to say: “there is the surface. Now think - or rather feel, intuit - what is beyond, what the reality must be like if it looks this way.”

Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.

Susan Sontag, On Photography, p23.

This woman is just pure gold. Everything I read in this book is like liquid diamonds, her thinking is so intense. I never fail to relate (although sometimes do fail to understand). This quote almost sums up my entire relationship with photographs. But of course, she comes up with more that help with that end…

All photographs are momento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.

Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. 

p.15

Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgements by the generalised pathos of looking at time past. . . 

A photograph is only a fragment, and with the passage of time its moorings come unstuck. It drifts away into a soft abstract pastness…

p.71

A photograph … is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. 

p.154

                                 The Realm of Captured Shadows

            They sat, they spoke, they stayed. Light and alchemy and optical measures worked together to immobilise the moment when these people were transformed into the realm of captured shadows.

            The photograph can have the ability to morph into something more than just an image. It is not a purely evidential or documentary mode or aim - it can have the power to transmute the human presences within into something magical and binding of the qualities of life and death, of person and presence, of reflections and impressions. A metamorphosis and transmutation of image back to body - and image to ‘life’.

             The plates, the ‘doubles’ of the individuals that visited David Knights-Whittome in his studio are stored, lined up, protected in paper cases like bodies in a morgue, or mummies in their bound linen - contained and preserved, attempting to defy all happenings of life. Surviving a century of continuing time and all its propelling forwardness. Damaged by water, heat, pressure, movement - and yet they still remain. The ones that have adhered to and yet fight against time, their journey in their continued photographic life leading up to the moments where my hands are holding them, my eyes staring directly into the eyes of the imprinted body…  and I feel the thud, the deep sensation of a stayed moment, a moment captured and fixed within the photograph a hundred years old or more - where the spiritual presence remains.

             Roland Barthes may describe this as ‘punctum’ - but these are not people that I have a relationship with. At least, they are not people that I have had contact with, have had no conversations or knowledge of their lives on this earth before this connection through my looking at the glass. There is no sharp sting of a ‘wound’ that pains me in the way of Barthes’ notion of a particular connection to the referent, other than purely looking. Barthes’ Camera Lucida brings to light the distressing inability to fully grasp his mother’s presence and ‘life’ within a photograph of her - to the extent that there is then no real truth in the photograph for him at all.

              There is no issue with recognition, as Barthes had, with the photographs I look at in this collection, and no struggle or straining for a lost or redundant essence of the individual within - these photographic traces that I hold are essences in themselves. Essences of the body replicated and impressed, one can say, on the emulsion that delicately rests on the polished, fragile glass. 

              The referent within, like a shadow or a mirror image of an individual, cannot be separated from the body of the person captured - it is an intrinsic  link and direct impression of the individual’s form into the photographic image. They reside there, looking back at us, continuing their bodily existence within the photograph. Reaching out from the delicate surfaces with their expressions and shadows, their detailed presence spellbound within their emulsion world. 

              The body that was, still is, within the emulsion, despite the continuation of time. The shadows of the individual persist and continue to exist after a century, leaving the individuals of the present to ponder their immortal remains.

obit:

I’ll wash your hair. I’ll sing, badly.
Messy, I’ll make mistakes. Trust.
Though, those words, that we don’t say: Life?, Love?,
Uneasy, obvious things that only show up in photographs.

I’ll wash our eyes.