“Photography could reach eternity though the moment.”

"Of all these things they wanted a permanent record; they wanted to stop the fleeing events of the moment, and treasure them as long as they lived, and hand them down for the advantage and pleasure of those who came after them."

"Such is the fact, that we may receive on paper the fleeting shadow, arrest it there, and in the space of a single minute fix it there so firmly as to be no more capable of change, even if thrown back into the sunbeam from which it derived its origin."

"The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our 'natural magic,' and may be fixed for ever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy..."

THE ART OF PHOTOGENIC DRAWING

Read Henry Fox Talbot's 1839 account of The Art of Photogenic Drawing.

SNAPSHOT – 21.3.2018

Barriers

Volume Excess Surfeit Abundance

Fragility

Alleviations

Curation

Durability Antrifragility Permanence Fixity

THE FAMILY TREE

Do you have photographs of your parents? Of your grandparents? What about your great-grandparents, or great-great-grandparents? How many of your ancestors left photographs of themselves behind for you to see?

Mother? Yes.

Father? Yes.

Maternal Grandmother? Yes.

Maternal Grandfather? Yes.

Paternal Grandmother? Yes.

Paternal Grandfather? Yes.

Maternal Grandmother's Parents? Yes, both.

Maternal Grandfather's Parents? Mother only, aka Grandma Bessie.

Paternal Grandmother's Parents? Yes, I think.

Paternal Grandfather's Parents? Probably.

Great-great-grandparents? Let me have a Google and get back to you!

THE ORIGINAL TABLET

Title: Library of Ashurbanipal

Year: 7th Century BC

Description: "Late Babylonian clay tablet: table of lunar longitudes. Contains a table for the daily change in the duration of the visibility of the moon on the thirty days of the month of the winter solstice according to the tradition of the city of Babylon." From a series of cuneiform clay tablets excavated in Kouyunjik, northern Iraq, believed to be the remains of King Ashurbanipal (668-c.630 BC) of Assyria's great library.

Significance: These clay tablets have weathered thousands of years, and still retain enough information for us to read. How long will our modern tablets last? I suspect that the iPad I am typing on will not be able to show you these words in a few decades, let alone hundreds of thousands of years...

UNEARTHED

The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto exhibited Memory Unearthed: The Lodz Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross, buried in 1944, dug up in 1945.

VIRTUAL UNFOLDING

Description: "In A.D. 79, Mount Vesuvius erupted violently, spewing pyroclastic flows across the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The eruption has become one of the most famous in history because the speed of the hot gases caught the locals unawares. The intense heat captured many features of city life, including individuals as macabre still-lifes. Much of this detail was then preserved beneath huge volumes of ash that rained down on the region. One of the discoveries made in 1752 in Herculaneum was of an intact library. This contained large numbers of papyrus scrolls of philosophical texts, many associated with the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus of Gadara. This is the only complete library that has survived from antiquity. And while many of the rolls were destroyed by workmen at the time and by scientists and archaeologists later, some 1,800 rolls survive, most of them in the Naples National Archaeological Museum in Italy."

Relevance: Today the scrolls are somewhat visible (mediated by technology) only because of their physical structure. "The material itself is built up from crisscrossed papyrus fibers that form a perpendicula...

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THIS PHOTOGRAPH HAS BEEN DELETED

Yes, you read that right — I uploaded this photograph privately to Pinterest, then I deleted it.

When I hit delete I was told “you won’t be able to get it back,” before confirming my intention, again hitting delete. The fact you can see this file at all means, theoretically, that all private uploads to Pinterest are public (if you can find them). While I don’t know how long this photograph will last on a server somewhere in the world, I thought I’ll leave it here (as a linked image), and together we shall see!

Post Script — the words in this photograph are by the inspirational picture book maker Oliver Jeffers and Austin Kleon, from whose blog you too can download Read a Book Instead for your screen.