Zooming In and Zooming Out

Posted on March 29, 2015 by nannus

Nerve impulses running down the spinal cord, triggering muscle cells – mitochondria pumping protons and electrons to provide the energy to move a muscle. The muscle contracts and the fingertip touches the release button, triggering a cascade of electronic signals, calculations, movements of electromechanical parts, chemical reactions inside a battery, a shutter opening, photons flashing inside and triggering chemical changes in the particles of the film. A myriad of smallest and shortest events and processes combine to produce that short “click” that indicates that a picture has been taken. The photographer looks away and her mind and eye turn on something else.

A short moment in her life. The moment she pressed the trigger of her camera. Clouds, trees or bushes, houses, the horizon, the sun. Motion blur. Lens Flair.

The photograph was shot while in motion, maybe from a train or a car. The hexagonal spots of lens flair are reflexes of the sun in the camera’s lenses, shaped by the partially closed aperture. There are smaller, more fuzzy hexagonal flare spots, maybe the result of droplets or dirt on the window or on the lens.

The hexagons, those artifacts of the aperture and of the optics of the lenses, have been colored in red and yellow during the photographs most recent stop. An artificial element has been added, but the paint has formed some random structures, visible through a magnifying glass, formed by surface tension and capillary action. Are these natural or artificial? The categories of natural and artificial are rather questionable, but these hexagons, maybe the most artificial part of the image, are showing clearly that the picture is not an objective image of the world out there but the result of a process – it is a trace of a moment, bringing together many factors, including the granularity of the film, the focus, the direction the camera was pointing, the moment it was triggered, the motion, the skill and experience of the photographer, as well as the quality of the camera’s optical system, based on the work of generations of photographers, workers, engineers, physicists and mathematicians.

But the moment that was captured in this picture has a history tracing back a far longer path in time. The sun, providing the light, coalesced out of a cloud of gas and dust billions of years ago, a cloud that originated in a supernova explosion of a previous star. The horizon is there because we are on the surface of a planet, the result of gravity acting on that primordial cloud. The clouds, the field, the trees, the houses, the street or railway, each of these are the products of a history containing plate tectonics, storms and sunshine, evolution of life, the history of humankind, technology. There is the biography of the photographer.

Transferred onto a black and white print from its original color slide, I hold the photograph in my hand now. It must have been bent somewhere on its trip, there is a slight bend just below the horizon. There are small specks of some dirt near the upper left corner of the white frame. First signs of aging, of being changed in history, a first little bit of a patina. It is not just an arbitrary copy of that original slide again, but it has started to acquire traces of its own history. Three of the hexagons have been painted. From a copy, produced in an electronic or photographic process of reproduction, it has been turned into an original.

There are probably fingerprints on the picture, invisible to the unaided eye. The paper has more properties than we know of, a microscope would reveal a tangle of fibers that once formed part of tree trunks in some forest. There might still be fragments of the DNA of those trees in it, of the DNA of some microbes or insects or that of a worker in the paper mill. There might be traces of the DNA of those who have been holding it. Maybe there are microscopic traces of dust and soot and cigarette smoke and soil and bacteria, from the streets of London or Vietnam or South Africa. But we are not going to slice it up and put it under a microscope. I am looking at it through an amplifying glass, I have scanned it and I can zoom in on screen, but as the accessible object I see, it exists on this human scale, a scale defined by our hands and eyes.

Between the scale of the very small and very short and the scale of the solar system that measures its age in terms of billions of years, there is this scale of the human being, reaching from the short moment of taking a single photograph to the biographies of several generations. So I am zooming in on that human scale now. The journey of the photograph is limited to this human world. It is traveling over the surface of earth, perhaps moving through a tunnel or several kilometers up in a plain, but limited to this thin sphere near earth’s surface. The time of the journey can be measured in days, weeks, months or years. It stays with me for a couple of weeks. In a few days or weeks, I am going to send it to somebody else.

The photograph has been put into an envelope, together with its fellow travelers added at several places. There are photographs and prints, small copies of maps, tickets for a ferry, a train, a museum, as well as some other objects. All of these have some meaning for the people who put them into this collection, or they document events that happened during the journey.

The envelope has been handed over in a post office or dumped into a post box, it has been sorted from one mail bag into another, gone from hand to hand, from conveyor to hand and back into mail bags, it has been sorted by machine and by eye, it went through the hands of many people. It has been put into air freight containers or gone by ship. It has travelled by truck or by bike. Each person in the mail system only knows the next station; nobody knows how the whole system works, with all of its details. The envelope carries some traces of the history it has gone through. Most of the detail of this history, however, is already forgotten. The mail system does not record what is happening inside it. That information is lost, dispersed in some heat radiation racing away from us into outer space. The envelope was thrown behind the horizon of that system in Canada and emerged at my doorstep several days later.

I have put the photograph into a frame, behind glass. The small painting that normally resides in this frame had to make room for it for a couple of days. A small watercolor painting, painted in 1925 by my grandfather Rolf Keller, showing the village of Ebersdorf where his mother was living. He painted it in the expressionist style of the time.

The expressionist style of the painting also does not provide an image of the painted object as it is, but a subjective view of it, as well as a view that has gone through the filters of a style that emerged out of the material and psychological destruction of World War I. The painting as well, is a trace of a moment in history.

The hook on the wall where the photograph is now hanging in my living room, as a guest in that frame, is normally occupied by a small triptych by Anita de Soto, painted on playing cards. I got it from her when she was visiting here from New Zealand some time ago. The back side reads “Hopeless cards. Made in Leipzig. Oil on paper 2010.” I know there are more of these. My sister has such a triptych as well. I don’t know if Anita turned a whole deck of cards into such paintings. They look like motion-blurred or stormy, very unlike the “clear” surrealist style of her large paintings.

So these are the paintings that now play host to the photograph on this stop, one providing a frame, the other one a hook on the wall.

The photograph is the record of a short moment in Emily’s life. Many of the contributions to this project, both on the blog and in the envelope, have some biographical aspect, providing a short view into the lives of the people taking part, providing insight into the projects they are working on, or glimpses of the lives of some other people, like that Nepalese boy with the paper plane, for example. Like individual fibers in a thread of wool, coming perhaps from different sheep but spun together into one yarn, fragments of different stories are combined here. The photograph acts as the condensation nucleus upon which these texts and photographs and paintings, these stories and thoughts, these interpretations and bits of imparted meaning, these snippets of different biographies, are accreting.

I am also going to add some snippets from a project I am currently working on, but I am neither a photographer nor a painter. I am currently working on a biographical project, transcribing letters written by my grandparents Grete and Rolf Keller. Below, I am giving some examples from those letters, translated into English. This project is both part of my current studies of history and philosophy, as well as part of a larger project of biographical work within my family.

By a range of historical accidents, a lot of biographical material, like letters, diaries, photographs and documents, has been preserved in my family. My mother, initially assisted by my late father, has transcribed countless letters and other documents, starting with material going back several generations before her own, and she is still continuing this work.

The letters I am currently working on are still uncharted territory. Each letter of my grandparrents, each sketch or drawing, each painting my grandfather left only provides a short glimpse into his life. Taken together, an overall picture is beginning to emerge from these fragments. To what extent is this overall picture a representation of the reality that existed, the reality experience by my grandparents and the people around them back in the 1950s and 1960s? To what extent is it a construction, showing shapes that are actually artifacts, just like those lens flare hexagons are artifacts of the imaging process, not real objects out there at the time when that photograph was taken? Each letter transcribed provides new information. The image is revised and shifting, and on the other hand it is shining new light on details that had been obscure on first reading. The understanding deepens by going through this hermeneutic circle. Additional information, from external sources as well as from my mother’s memory, is adding further detail. It is like zooming in and zooming out.

One pervasive topic in the letter is mail. Parcels where sent both ways and their contents listed, letters and parcels where announced, their arrival confirmed. Photographs were also sent, as exemplified by the first citation below, and sometimes hand-drawn sketches.

Another Main topic is travel. The letters set in in 1956, when my father, accompanied by a friend of the family who had visited them, left Karl-Marx-Stadt (now again called Chemnitz) and went to Hamburg in the western part of Germany, crossing the border between east and west that was still open at the time. So the fact of separation into two different cities is what triggers the letters. The very first letter, from July 16^th, 1956, picks the topic of travel out as its first main theme. In thinking about his son’s trip to the city of Hamburg, where Rolf Keller had been living before, his thoughts went back to the time when he himself arrived in that city, many years earlier, thus providing a little piece of biographical information that would have been lost otherwise. We read:

“…It has become rather quiet in our place, a condition we will have to get used to bit by bit. In bed, we were always looking at the clock: now they are in Leipzig – now in Bitterfeld. Mother could not sleep at all and played solitaire in the night. Quarter to nine, now they’ll be there shortly.

This brought the time of 1919 back to my mind, when I left on one Saturday to start my job with RAG at Rathausmarkt on Monday. In those days, I lived in Hamburg 24, Schröderstr. 24, with one Mrs. Kamnitzer. The street does not exist anymore, the number 24 has remained.

…

I am adding a few photographs which I am sure you would like to have. …”

That the street no longer exists is a reference to World War II, when Hamburg, like many other cities, was heavily bombed. The number 24 refers to Rolf Keller’s logo, a stylized 24 that he designed when he started his own business in 1924. You can see it on the painting of Ebersdorf above. The remembered biography is a selected and reformed version of reality, and in that process, meaning can be added, as is exemplified with the number 24 here.

The content of most of the letters, however, refers to the time when they were written. The letters provide a view into life in the GDR in the 1950s and 1960s, from the unique point of view of a self-employed graphic artist. Let me give you one more example, describing my grandfather’s work at the Leipzig industrial fair of 1958, where he was preparing paintings of machines, to be used in leaflets or brochures. The letter, to his son, is dated March 10^th, 1958 (“Lederbogen” was a publisher Rolf Keller was occasionally working for, Defa was a state-owned film producer, HO was a national retail chain):

“…I wanted to get brochures or technical literature for you in Leipzig, but due to lack of time, I could not get anything appropriate. Wanted to write to you from Leipzig, but! On Friday, Feb. 28^th early morning I drove with the Lederbogen-people. On Friday, Saturday and early Sunday we designed the stand. On Monday [I went] to the technical fair where delivered some work to Sch. and he told me I should make suggestions for some watercolors. So from 9 in the morning to half past 5 in the evening I was sketching 8 machines, in the middle of the most active hustle and bustle of the fair. Often there was only one point of view for a machine or an assembly line and in the case of two machines, that point was in the middle of the stream of fairgoers who nearly without exceptions occluded the object of interest and opened up the view on what had to be drawn only for moments. Investing all my energy, at two o’clock I had sketched 5 machines, then hunger made itself felt. But the office where my briefcase was standing was locked because of a conference of the postal service. I had to go to an HO food booth to devour the national dish: bratwurst with bread roll. Then I was searching for a place to sit in order to rest for a quarter of an hour because the drawing within the crowd, the stupid comments when they were spotting the “painter”, the noise and the standing which I am not used to and being bumped into had made me tired. The only free arm chair I could find belonged to the institute for technology and as soon as I was stretching my tired bones in the chair, I was bombarded with new questions, technical ones this time, because sitting there with my white lab coat, people thought I was one of the specialist engineers where one could get technical information. So up again. I spotted the cinema and quickly entered. With empty gaze, I was watching a film about plastic materials. Unfortunately, the film about “buffing” was only been shown in the evening. I would have been interested in that one. With new energy I continued making sketches, so that in the evening I could present 8 sketches to Mr. Sch. of which 6 were approved to be implemented as watercolors. Then I painted on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday during the night. Interesting; photographers, pressmen, radio reporters, Defa and TV where at work. My work went on well so that Tuesday night from 5 PM to 6 AM I finished 3 watercolors. Wednesday I achieved only 2, and Thursday I was finished already half past 12 in the night with all 6. …”

So this is the kind of material among which the photograph is spending its time here, both as a material object ant as a mental object in my mind. Snipets of biography being added to this thread.

I will soon be packing the photograph back into the envelope. I am going to add a copy of a sketch from one of the letters, a sketch showing some tropical plants, a hobby of Rolf Keller and another topic showing up in the letters a lot. Maybe I am going to use a new, larger envelope and put the old one inside. The old envelope has gathered lots of inscriptions, stickers, adhesive tape, an object that has recorded some part of the trip of the photograph, providing traces of its own “biography”; but soon it will no longer be suited for the mail system. Like a molting caterpillar, the picture is getting out of its old skin and getting a new one, but it will take the old one along, an object that is becoming part of this slowly growing collective work, or rather project, of art, history, biography, philosophy or whatever it might be and become. What it will become, I don’t know. The past is known only in fragments and the future is open.

From Banff National Park, Canada

Posted on February 9, 2015 by searchingtosee

I first learned of the Journey of a Photograph project from my dear friend the artist, Summer Lee. I knew little of the project, only that it was a photograph traveling around the world to various artists who would then use the photo to inspire their own work in some way. I didn’t read the blog or other’s interpretations or actions with the photograph prior to receiving the package. Which also means I didn’t read Emily’s first post with the image showing the photograph itself. On some level this was intentional, a method to respond first to the materiality of the photo rather than the aura created by its journey. I was intrigued by Emily’s concept and its potential because of the physicality of the project; I would receive something in the mail that many other people have touched, lived with, or altered in their own specific environment and I would then become part of that story.

The package arrives to me amidst my own nomadic two years. I left a job in Montreal in December 2013 and have been traveling to various artist residency programs since that time. The photograph arrived in Massachusetts for the holidays to commence the brief overlap of our journeys. My idea was for the photo to accompany me to my next artist residency located in Banff, Alberta where I would then respond with my own contribution. The day came when the packaged photo and I took a plane together from Boston via Minneapolis, finally landing in Calgary. We had an easy flight and after a night at the airport hotel, took off on a bus to the Banff National Park, home to the artist residency program. On my second day at The Banff Centre, I opened the package and posted the contents to my studio wall. I had only expected one photo, but enclosed were ferry tickets, museum passes, maps, words, and other photos. I was reluctant to reference the blog so early in the process, but how was I to decipher which photograph was “the” photograph?

The contents of the package and the photo itself all hang above my studio desk where I have now been for nearly two weeks. My window overlooks snowy mountains, treetops, and the majestic castle-like structure alone on the a mountain known as the Banff Springs Hotel. After a few days of contemplating these artifacts and potential five photos that could be “the” photo, I began reading the blog. I became enthralled with the lives of the people who previously were in possession of the photo and the life of the photo itself. I wondered about Laura and her health, I thought about Summer at the moment when the photo entered her life knowing how much has changed since then. I considered Emily’s interlude reunion with the photograph one year ago. I also wonder about the photo itself. Does it ever, like I do, get a little tired of always being on an adventure? Does it long for a singular space to rest, knowing full well that its destiny is to travel?

When I first held the photograph (yes, “the” intended photograph), I was reminded of the Marfa Lights. A phenomenon in Western Texas where sphere-shaped lights colored red, orange, yellow, and white hover and dart on the horizon line of the desert sky. The lights are thought to be either paranormal activity or reflections from a distant highway. Having viewed them first hand while spending one summer in Marfa, I can’t be sure what they are. But I like the mystery and the colors superimposed over the landscape and the continued curiosity they bring. As I look at the photograph and read about its travels, I note that many people are careful with the object itself. Yes, of course, on some level there is a responsibility to not be the person who ruins the photo or the journey. But in thinking about collaborative art, I am surprised no one has yet to intervene on the actual photograph. Many have scanned the image and then altered it or used its likeness in other mediums. But what about the materiality? I feel the inclination to respond to the object, on the object. To alter it in some way, a way that could risk everything. An intervention adding to the layers of meaning directly to the immediacy of the photo. After two years of traveling, would the photograph like a new hairstyle? (even just a trim?) Transformation can be devastating, but it can also make way for a rebirth.

I have decided to intervene on the photograph. But I will not show the image here. It will be a mystery for the next recipient of the package. So even if they are devoted to the blog and know the image by heart, it will not be what they are expecting.

As I send the photo on its way, I am including a small orange flag. The flag references my last project in which I spent six months living and developing an educational project on Fogo Island in Newfoundland, Canada. In short, not too long ago, flags were placed atop houses that were to be relocated or “launched” to another community. The flag indicated to neighbors that help was needed to get the house on its way, so community members would arrived at the sight of the flag and depending on the structure, the house would travel to its new home either by land, sea, or ice. So I add the little orange flag as a small prayer…let helpful neighbors get you to your next home little photo!

Thank you Emily for allowing me to join this journey and take a moment within my practice to consider mystery, transformation, and the power of one photo to creatively influence people around the world.

Nicole Lattuca

Press On

Posted on October 27, 2014 by settleandchase

tick – tock – tick – tock
step – step – step

I loved the idea of this project from the beginning, over a year ago now. It set a seed, inspired me to look towards from a difficult time, into the future, a place I hoped to reach.

Sometimes you don’t know why you do, you don’t even know if you can, you just know you have to. You press faith into faith, and hope the meaning will come clear. You keep laying each mark, and trying to build. Through a series of connections, you begin to make up a whole. Throwing stars at the moon, hoping to leave a pattern.

This project itself is a journey of many parts, gaining more resonance and a sense of itself as it moves on. Each bone in the spine is essential. I love to think of how long it might stretch.

This small composition forms part of what I hope to be a larger piece of music, this is a sketch of something slowly evolving, but somehow as it has grown with me since the seed of Emily’s project began, when I first saw the photograph and started to sing, it seemed perfect to post the first part of its journey here.

I’ll now send off the package, with a note to join the others, on to its next. A small part of me travels too..

This package was such fun to open. Thankyou Emily!

Cathryn Stone 2014.

Lines

Posted on September 29, 2014 by sydney

My small contribution to Journey of a Photograph is now off to its next recipient.

It’s taken me a while to be ready to make something for this project, in part because of all the travel and work that came between the parcel’s arrival and my own ability to stop and think about what I could add … what would be a suitable and (hopefully) interesting addition to the diversity I found sandwiched in the envelope.

I wanted to bring something about motion and space and connection to bear here. The Photograph and its travelling companions have been all over the planet, and in the last few months, I have been across the country, twice. The time and kilometres spent at 35000 feet or more could be a divisive thing – a separation from what keeps me going. It can be seen that way, certainly. Being ‘away’ is like that: the removal from home and all that entails, separation from family and friends and familiar things that ground and keep us whole. But the going to provided their own sense of home and community; these just-past travels brought me to new friends, allowed me to re-connect to others I know already, provided the opportunity to go to places I hold dear in my heart and see family that I miss deeply too.

Like the pull of the tide, this motion has seemed inevitable, and essential.

Lines.

On a map. Highways, dirt side roads, borders, boundaries. Railways. Ways of getting to. And from. And away.

On my hands and around my eyes, the parts of me most evident and face-first in the making, and moving from one place to another. Squinting into the sun. Looking at the horizon.

At what comes next.

On a shore, marking time and tide and the space between one land and another. Divisions metaphorical too – not to be crossed.

I made a photocollage to send on: using the original Photograph as the base layer, adding another image I found in the package, and then finally some image stills for a video I shot in the UK last year.

But, in the end, this seemed inadequate to the task at hand: attempting to capture space and time and motion and the movement of one small package that – in traversing the globe – has connected, and will continue to connect – so many people.

So. In the end, my final offering is this:

… travel on … and enjoy the journey, and the stillness within it.

Designated

Posted on April 13, 2014 by petrujviljoen

I followed this photograph’s journey for a while. I lost the track of it round about after summermlee posted the work that he, and other collaborators, made based on this photograph. Recently Emily Hughes posted a request for another address for a memory to be made. She felt it wasn’t time for its journey to end. Bravely, I put myself forward as a possible next participant. I don’t like journeys to end merely because there’s nowhere else to go.

In reading others’ entries I was struck by how people must’ve changed within themselves within this year (this month is a year since the journey started) it took for this photograph to travel this world.

Within myself, a year ago, I was too shy, had too little self confidence. I’ve since taken part in other collaborations which gave me the faith (thanks summermlee) in my work to forward my address so the next memory could be made based on this photograph.

One is on a journey whether one stays put or not. I’ve had times when a walk to the kitchen from my bedroom was epic. I traversed some of the mountain (a real one) on which I stay in the meantime. Work processes, spiritual growth, reaching for maturity of mind, health, finding peace, (at some cost); all are, were, will be journeys.

The image is ephemeral, transient, non-specific, unfixed in any given time or space. This journey of this photograph can be traced and is being accumulated into one specific place. One can’t help but wonder what Emily’s motive is for facilitating this? Searching to See, probably.

This may sound strange, even fickle, but ideas are a dime a dozen sometimes. I had, in fact, set aside some prints, images scanned in, photos of my own, photos of the parcel and its contents, other ephemera, to use. Which I then didn’t use. A spontaneous reaction to a post by Nannus on Asifoscope found me flying into the studio, the place that other people would call a lounge, and I started the work with whatever I could lay my hands on. So the process the artwork went through, became the journey. I recorded various stages of the work process and posted this on my site. It seems collaborating in, discussing, blogging about art is good for me at present.

Rudolf Arnheim, in Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, said: Every memory has an address. I have the book next to me as I write. Couldn’t find the entry in order to give a chapter and page number. It may very well fall under the chapter called Light. Something cryptic, as is the photograph: this is ironic. With respect to the past.

destination

Posted on March 16, 2014 by searchingtosee

please let me know if you are interested in becoming a contributor to the journey!

searchingtosee

The journey of a photograph is looking for new participants. It has been such a creative and inspiring journey, but it’s not ready to end yet. Currently the photograph resides in New Zealand, and although I’m sure it’s enjoying it’s little sojourn there by the beach with Maureen of kiwissoar (and how envious I am of it), it needs to move on to new destinations. If you are an artist, writer, photographer, or any other type of uncategorisable creative being (aren’t they the best types?) and think you might have something to add to the journey, please contact me , or sign up via the blog. Contributions have been varied and unique, each and every one, from solargraphs to mosaics, and poetry: check out the blog to see where the photograph has been and what it has inspired thus far. I can promise your practice and even your…

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De revolutionibus

Posted on February 19, 2014 by jesús joglar

Last February 15th was the 450 aniversary of the bird of Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642). As everbody knows Galileo was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer and philospher. In other words, he was a Renaissance scientist who played a major role in the scientific revolution. Galileo’s championing of heliocentrism was controversial within his lifetime; he was investigated by the Roman Inquisition, which concluded that heliocentrism was false and contrary to scripture, placing works advocating the Copernican system on the index of banned books and forbidding Galileo from advocating heliocentrism. He was tried by the Holy Office, then found “vehemently suspect of heresy”, was forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism.

Nicolaus Copernicus (19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was also a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who formulated Heliocentrism, a scientific model of the universe which placed the Sun, rather than the Earth, at the center. The publication of Copernicus’ book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), just before his death in 1543, is considered a major event in the history of science. It began the “Copernican Revolution” that resolved the issue of planetary retrograde motion by arguing that such motion was only perceived and apparent, rather than real…

The solar system has the Sun in its center with all the planets spining in eliptical orbits around it. The Earth’s orbit is the motion of the Earth around the Sun, from an average distance of 149.59787 million kilometers away. A complete orbit of the Earth around the Sun occurs every 365.2563666 mean solar days (1 sidereal year). This motion gives an apparent movement of the Sun with respect to the stars at a rate of about 1°/day eastward, as seen from Earth. On average it takes 24 hours—a solar day—for Earth to complete a full rotation about its axis relative to the Sun so that the Sun returns to the meridian. The orbital speed of the Earth around the Sun averages about 30 km/s (108,000 km/h). Assuming Earth’s orbit around the sun to be circular, the “journey” of the Earth in one year is roughly 940 million kilometers (585 million miles).

Some years ago I read the book “The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe.” by Arthur Koestler, an interesting informative approach to the history of Astronomy. In the book, the author stated that the highly technical “De Revolutionibus” was ignored by 16th-century readers.

More recently, it came to my eyes an incredible “journey” of more than 30 years carried out by Owen Gingerich, a former Research Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University, and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. He spent more than 30 years of his life hunting down every known surviving copy of Nicolaus Copernicus’s 1543 opus, “De revolutionibus” [see http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2004/04/13/book_quest_took_him_around_the_globe/]

His journey began as “a smallish project” to prove whether Copernicus’s work was or wasn’t read. Gingerich tracked who first owned each book, deciphered notes that studious readers – including Galileo Galilei – had penned in the margins, and plotted each book’s travels to form a picture of what the scientific network of the day looked like. His exhaustive research proved beyond question that “De Revolutionibus” was, indeed, a hard book to put down.

Needless to say that I have ordered Gingerich book and I am eager to read it!

As most of the formers contributors to this “Journey of a Photograph” when I received the parcel and look at the picture inside it, I thought of a journey in a train. The trees in that picture inspired me and, after harvesting several drink cans converted to pinhole cams to register solargraphs during a holiday trip to my homeland in Asturias (North coast of Spain) I was lucky enough as to have manage to point in the right direction.

In the solargraph you see a centenary oak covered by the sun trails from the 15th of August 2013 to the 7th of February 2014. When I opened the can I found some water inside wetting the sensible black and white paper. This is, most probably, the responsible of producing those blue spots in the bottom and the “peculiar” brownish color. After letting it dry in the dark, I scanned the image formed during those months to get (after minimum post process in PS) the image you see above.

Can you image the distance we all traverse in our lives without even noticing it? A long Journey based on “Revolutionibus”

Interlude

Posted on January 15, 2014 by searchingtosee

‘Interlude’

‘The Journey’

The intimate is not a space but a relationship between spaces.

– Beatriz Colomina

I was forced, recently, to take a break from blogging. Not really by choice, but because life burst forth in a relentless tidal wave of busyness (as it does every year at the same time), and something had to give. However, I have been continuing to make pictures, and the past few months has been a process of consolidation and gathering together of things which I have been thinking about and working on for a long time, years even. I have not made any ‘new’ pictures as such; it is the nature of photography that you can be extremely prolific when you are clicking a button (that’s the easy part), yet it’s the editing that take the time; the drawing together the threads of the narrative and the sifting through the rubble to seek out those lustrous gems. It has been more a process of looking back, reflecting, and relentless revision, which at times has been tedious and painful, but also extremely necessary and ultimately rewarding, because it has brought some clarity of thinking, and more importantly, some direction.

Many participants in the collaborative Journey of a Photograph project, which I initiated back in February of last year, have commented on the ‘layers’ which the photograph has gathered as it travels from participant to participant in far-flung corners of the globe. An enviable journey it has made so far, hopping from Ottawa to London to LA to Brussels, to name a few destinations. The description of the Winter Garden photograph, which Barthes writes of in the opening of Camera Lucida, opens the blog. With its faded sepia print and blunted corners this photograph was for Barthes a symbol of time past, and it proudly wore its scars in the way that a treasured piece of furniture might gather and wear the scrapes and knocks of everyday familial use – the ‘battle scars’ of age. But this photograph – my photograph – isn’t really old yet. Or at least the reproduction of it is not. The image itself was taken over 10 years ago when I was a different person; a different version of ‘me’.

‘The photograph’ – January 2014

I think that when people are writing about, and indeed responding to the ideas of these layers in their own work in many, many wonderfully different and creative ways (which I will save for another discussion on the blog), they are thinking about the significance that this photograph (as opposed to a photograph, a regular reproduction) – which has become more than just a photograph but a whole package (or ‘a neatly packaged risk’ – as summed up perfectly by Summer Lee) – is gathering. With each journey it becomes a bit more precious, and a bit more unique. The package itself; a patchwork of stamps and postmarks wrapped with industrial amounts of sellotape, is becoming more fragile. It is creating its own memory and its own history. However, this is not a history which is a natural cause of time passing, but a shared history forced through intervention. The photograph, and the many beautiful and thoughtful ‘things’ it has inspired and instigated and accumulated along the way on its journey; the package it has become, which binds a disparate little group of bloggers and artists and writers together, is a very public and self-conscious history. This is of course in marked contrast to the private history represented by Barthes’ Winter Garden photograph.

This project has made me look upon the role of photography and memory is a new way, crystallising many ongoing ideas I have had about photography and objects and memory; giving them form, physicality and practice. But it has also forced me to look at my own past and more specifically my past work with fresh eyes. I started the project off with an image I took when I was in my 20s studying for my MA. It was part of a series of images on the subject of what I called ‘in-between space’. In this case the ‘non-space’ of the motorway journey. It seemed to fit the theme, but I wasn’t really sure why I chose that image when I sent it off. Now I think I understand a bit better. I used to feel I had ‘moved on’ from it all, maybe even a little embarrassed at the immaturity of my earlier work, however doing this project has made me realise that it was and remains yet very much an important part of me. Even though now I wouldn’t make that work in the same way, it is still relevant. If it is still ‘me’, it is a ghost, a shadow of me which contains a small kernel of what I am now, and what I will be. The picture I chose I described as ‘nondescript’, I think, in my post. It had something in it which I thought could become something, but which wasn’t quite up to it by itself, wasn’t quite there yet, and I think that’s why I was drawn to it. I was never entirely happy with what that project became. It almost felt like it was stranded in mid-air…. It was as if I knew I needed to go back to it, and perhaps this was my way of doing that.

So, I would like to thank you all for adding your layers, each and every one, and for helping me get to where I am now. Some of you have commented on how the project has revived, or even changed your practice. Well, this is certainly the case for me. I also feel that, more significantly, within the very public and impersonal ‘in-between’ space of the internet, and over vast distances, we have succeeded in creating a shared space of intimacy represented by this little package, and of course this blog. Something which I tried to realise 10 years ago, but was unable to.

Now that life is finding its way back to a more manageable ebb and flow, I am resuming my blogging journey. The photograph too will journey on again – it is not yet ready to relinquish its voyage of discovery. It sits on my desk as I type, this neat little package. I seized the opportunity created by a lull in the project to bring it back home to me, and I’m glad that I did as it’s quite comforting to have it here, to open it and absorb for myself the little treasures and keepsakes which have been entrusted to it. I have also added my own little token to the package, and now I look forward, with renewed enthusiasm, to what the next phase of the project brings. I think, perhaps, we both just needed a bit of a break.

The images at the start of this post are from a series I have been working on over the past couple of months called ‘Horizon’.

‘night train to sapa ’

Posted on October 8, 2013 by Carla Saunders

I received Emily’s photograph September 28nd 2013. Having followed her blog, from the beginning, I had often thought what would I do if I were asked to put together a piece for this collaboration.

Emily invited me to participate and I was sent the photograph to interpret from my point of view. My first thought was, I’m looking at a full moon at night viewed from a moving train. The image reminded me of an overnight trip on a local train from Hanoi to Sapa in Northern Vietnam. I lay on a steel plank on the bottom bunk. I shared the compartment with five other people. It was dark. Flashes of light came in through the window. Metal against metal screeched. Strange smells, sights and sounds of humans asleep came at me for what turned out to be a long nightmarish night. I kept my mind occupied by writing a poem in my head. When I returned home, I made ‘night train to sapa town’ first into a poem and then into an Artists’ Book printed on handmade paper. The poem became the basis for this project.

I started my project with a series of charcoal sketches of the night sky, which were drawn in the middle of the night.

Thinking of the train ride and Emily’s image, it’s shapes and connotations, I took some photographs. ‘Full Moon Over the City’ and ‘Steel and Wood’ built towards my final painting, Three paintings later, I was satisfied with ‘Good morning. Would you like a cup of tea?’ (acrylic on canvas measuring 32” x 32”) click on image to enlarge

Personal connections are happening here. Participating artists are commenting on each other’s work. One artist included a photograph; another artist added a leaf with a message written on it. Added to this collection, was a tiny four-leaf clover from an artist in Belgium. Now, I am adding my admission ticket to Ho Chi Minh Museum in Hanoi. I carefully put back, into the original envelope, the photograph and it’s companion pieces. The photograph is ready to continue it’s journey.

If you would like to participate in the journey of this photograph take a look here.

To find out more about how this project started visit Emily’s blog.
To visit my blog go to http://carlasaunders.com/

Thank you, Emily. Your project took me to a new place in my art. I really enjoyed the ride.

Missing

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Chris Bronsk

Emily’s photograph arrived while I was away. I was on a road trip with my wife and son down to San Diego and back. We’d spent the better part of two weeks covering the West Coast, and the date stamped on the notice from the post office tells me her picture arrived while I was somewhere in the Sacramento Valley. As the mail carrier knocked on my door, I was likely speeding through sere grasslands toward the foothills, where our little hatchback would grumble as the elevation gained and the big rigs hauling fruit and spools of cable toward the border would groan even louder.

Or maybe we hadn’t made it that far yet. The miles, as they multiplied, also subdivided, erased in the haze of the wide, torrid valleys. For all our speed we were moving slowly, and all our distance had taken us, it seemed, nowhere. And this is just what we had needed after a few hard years, to unravel in this slowness and be washed by the land rushing past. To not be, as on a plane, exempt from the unprivileged points between beginnings and ends. Yet not entirely subject to the frictions of distance either.

The interstate we travelled for miles and days through California and Oregon passes near where we live, where Emily’s photograph has arrived on this stop of its journey. Under the overpass where the interstate crosses the ship canal there is a small homeless camp, one of countless camps under bridges and unclaimed spaces inside and around the city. Regularly, tents appear in that dark trapezoid like mushrooms that some invisible hand later culls so that one day, I see on a walk to the park with my son, they are gone—at least until they spring up again.

A guy once told me on a city bus, when the buses were still free downtown, that he and his wife, who was napping beside him, wouldn’t go to the shelters anymore. He said it was better to camp out, even during the rain, and bet the police that would eventually come and kick them out would do so without hauling them to jail. “The shelters aren’t safe,” he said, “too many things happen there. And we can cook outside. We just went to the camping store and got a bunch of propane. Anything you bring to the shelter just gets taken by somebody. Outside, we at least can take our chances.”

A wall can be a barrier and a shelter. I realize more and more the ways we can connect and go missing. This photograph found me, away, almost as easily as it might have found someone down the street in the building with my street number’s middle digits reversed—3621 instead of 3261, the error of a mail carrier daydreaming. But it was a hot summer’s day, we would have said, and his thoughts were climbing over a wall, taking their chances. Maybe they were and maybe we would have, having seen them before ourselves, inching upward, into the foothills of their own belief.