DESAPARECIDO / LOST
Context: The alternative to preserving photographs, is to lose them. What does a book of lost photographs look like?
Aim: To visually represent the absence of lost photographs.
Precedent: Will Steacy's Photographs Not Taken (book cover pictured above), perhaps the only photography book I’ve bought that is entirely devoid of photographs, is "a collection of photographers' essays about failed attempts to make a picture…These mental negatives depict the unedited world and the moments of life that do not exist in a single frame." In a different vein, I have also previously created a photobook devoid of photographs, 2nd’s, after I discovering a dusty box of slides marked 2nd’s. Inside this box I found empty slide mounts along with what appeared to be accidentally mounted frames from the end of rolls of film, partially exposed, partly blank, yet curiously interesting.
Method: I began by thinking about my own experiences with lost photographs, in particular one instance that still haunts me. After a trip across Europe in 2011, I discovered one of my compact flash cards to be blank, a memory card I had used in my main camera almost exclusively for the three days I spent in Barcelona. I tried again and again, unsuccessfully, to recover data from this card. I kept the card in a drawer for years, just in case, occasionally testing it on a whim, wishing in vain. I sketched and tested for ways to show no photos, even purchasing the blackest black paint I could find, in the hope of hiding all light. Alas, it wasn't dark enough for me. Eventually I settled for laser copier black, reproducible in a zine with the intention of causing others to consider the fragility of their own photographic memories, pairing black rectangles with descriptions (in Spanish) of photographs I remember taking, but no longer have, and perhaps never even saw. In addition to creating a single miniature concertina book of lost photographs, with hand cut holes poignantly highlighting absence.
Result:
Significance: About the time of this experiment, I became confident that I do not want to ask (or answer) the question, "what is lost?"
This is closer to a critical experiment than the binding experiment. You're asking a question about something unknown (how do we visualise loss, in particular lost photographs?) and responding through making. Have a look at Sophie Calle's book Ghosts: https://entropymag.org/sophie-calles-ghosts/ What else did you learn from this – not just about the theme/topic of loss (and not wanting to go there), but about the process of responding to a question through making?
May 01, 2018 by Zoe