Found images.
I sometimes wonder about all the photographs and where they end up. This curiosity can be sharply brought to the fore when I encounter discarded images from someone else’s archive. These mostly take the form of slides because how do you stumble across the work of a digital photographer that never printed. There is a melancholy attached to discoveries like this. Who was the photographer? Were they proud of their work? Does their work matter, does mine? Looking at my binders of negatives I have to consider ‘what if they all were destroyed’. The fact is the world would go on none the wiser and no worse off. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy photography, it is just in this image saturated time, I need to keep what I am doing in perspective. I am not changing the world.
So it was with these slides that I came across in a thrift store piled in a shoe box. Each roll carefully noted by the well travelled photographer. I chose one slide box marked from Paris and left the rest for others to discover.
There is a flip side to this and that is that as time passes even otherwise mundane photographs take on significance through the weight of time. The ‘Fragments of Vancouver’ archive of images I am going through is a prime example of this. People frozen in time 70 years ago as they walked passed a Vancouver street photography company photographer. The way they dressed the way they responded to the photographers presence stored on rolls of film like a time capsule to be opened at a later time or lost forever depending on chance.
So I will continue to photograph and sometimes print because its meaningful to me at least in this moment. And someday maybe someone will come across one of my images and question if it matters.
April 23rd, 2020 at 11:27 pm
Interesting theme in your discourse this go round. You almost had me agreeing with you that you “are not going to change the world”. When I come to your site, or any site, and look at the photography and read the commentary, I am “affected”. Exactly how and to what degree, on that I unclear. But there is no mistake, I am affected in some way. Anything and everything we hear, see,taste, touch affects us. In fact there is no such thing as being unaffected by anything we come into contact with, there is always a “chemical” reaction. May sound hokey, but I don’t think it is at all. A
April 23rd, 2020 at 11:38 pm
All that to say, I think you are “affecting” the world in your own way…changing it. We all are. Its just a
question of how are we affecting or changing the world. I think I know what you meant, no you may not be famous. Ask your family, or your friends if they’re affected by your life, or your photography. I personally like your photography and your posts on cameras. I also like that you don’t ramble too much but leave a little something to chew on in these short posts. A little commentary plus some photography, perfect. My two cents