I saw an advert for the 1970’s futurist magazine Omni, many years ago and it consisted primarily of a statement, which read thus:
“The Past is gone. The Present, lost as it arrives. There is only Tomorrow”
These words stuck with me, for a number of reasons, as I do enjoy the futuristic and science-fiction view of things, but also, like the Roman god Janus, I also revere the past. One face forever turned forward, but another perpetually looking back.
For this reason, the phrase from Omni magazine at once excited, but also saddened me and feels even more profound as I have aged myself, beyond the midpoint, where I have much more life behind me than I can possibly hope to look forward to.
It's said that Times' Arrow flies in one direction only, forward into the future, so, without hope or chance of practical time travel, how can we look back at the past? We can extrapolate as to how the future may develop, but the past is already formed and laid out behind us like an invisible frieze. As the present moment arrives and unravels before our eyes, we can only hope to capture glimpses of its fleeting moments with photography. These frozen slices of time then serve to augment the memory we may have apprehended and if cared for, continue to do so as the panoply of space and time rolls inexorably forward.
But here lies a fundamental problem. How are we expected to carry the billion fractured moments that we may experience in a lifetime, forward and in some cases beyond our own existence?
As we have seen in previous posts, photographic imagery has been captured on sheets of metal, on panes of glass and on fugitive slivers of film and curling paper.
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| 1960's Tourism Slides |
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| The 'Still' Collection of glass slides |
The set of slides which inspired the poetry portfolio ‘Still’ were found at a boot sale. Boxes and boxes of 35mm slides are discarded as the means to display store them has become obsolete and they take up considerable storage space. Albums full of nameless individuals, crammed full of photographs of other lives, are passed over, as without a direct personal connection to the contents or personalities in the frames, most people will find no value in them.
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| A small japanese album with 2.5" prints |
My last visit to York Racecourse found a stall holder with several tea chests, full of fifties and sixties prints, books, albums and correspondence from Japan. As I am unable to read Japanese, none of the information held any meaning and although some of the quite beautiful prints and paintings found buyers, once again the more mundane and quotidian items lay in the boxes, unappreciated.
I bought a small album with black and white prints in many different sizes and formats, which seemed to have belonged to a young Japanese girl. Most of the photographs were of school or college activities and sports events, but also showed trips and presumably holidays and some shots of friends and family. Some of the prints were really small, at about 2.5 inches high and seemed to be from a Polaroid type camera, others were more standard sizes and all were monochrome. Once more, like the family grouping on the beach I had found, here was yet another instance of a life discarded and left for strangers to pick over, like the rag merchants in Dickens novels.
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| A world in miniature |
Glass slides, plastic frames and paper prints at least have a presence, a physicality, which can be held and examined. The many boxes of 35mm slides, the various albums of prints, the pile of magic lantern glass and the other images I have, could easily fit into the tiniest corner of digital storage, were I to scan them all and place them on my portable, 1 terabyte drive. This would free up several bookshelves worth of physical space and they would share the company of the several thousand digital images I have amassed over the last twenty or thirty years.
But should the unforeseen happen and my own goods and chattels be cleared away in my absence, would anyone stoop to inspect this bare slab of black plastic, if it lay on a table amidst books and models and the flotsam and jetsam gathered in a lifetime of hoarding and collecting? Chances are slim and anything not immediately sold at such events is almost certainly disposed of.
So what is any artist or photographer to do? Even digital images are not truly safe, as their essential nature makes them subject to the whims of electromagnetism. Perhaps the most effective course of action is to enjoy each moment as it occurs and hope that the record we leave behind may be perceived by some like minded soul at some future date, fallen somewhere as rain.
