The Photographer Battles the Inevitable

 

 

Point. Shoot. fstop. Time. Cut. Develop. Preserve. Capture. Take.

the bravura.

I’m an old man now. I know about time. I know how I am not I. No longer. This mottling, freckling, wrinkling and mole-ridden flesh each new hour I am forced to call mine. The pain in the shoulders and the neck and the knees, my excruciatingly stooped back, my trembles and twitches…I fight back.

I capture the young. Flesh nubile and soft, pliable and pure, elastic. I carry my posture of strength, contracted muscles of athletic days on this little 3×5 glossy scrap, you see? Here’s uncle Mort – alive, swimming – BEFORE 1918 and he was no more. Pah! Right here friend! Right here is uncle Mort. And the Native Americans did live here first, and did wear strange clothing, ride horses, build tee-pees and clod huts – you see?

What might have been erased by vile death, by erosion, what we may have never truly “witnessed” or “seen” – right here through this powerful small cannon!

If we speak simply of existing, in whatever form (given what becomes of our actual bodies and minds) Atget has defeated death – you may challenge me to find his flesh, his bones, his musty breath – perhaps not! But here, right here! His aspect, his presence, his form. See? None of us, none of us, even those of us who greet it at our own hands, like death. We try to circumscribe it, undo and short-circuit its authority, vitiate its inevitability – well, here is how I do it!

Death and anonymity destroyed by the ambiguity of the lens! You may have no inkling WHO this subject is/was, but you will not doubt that they were, and therefore are in your ingestion of their image.

Beauty vs. decay. Beauty of decay. Youth versus age, the vitality of age. Life against death, or the life of death. I can capture it, exercise my will to power, stay the tide if only this moment, you see?

The action makes the difference in the arts. That I can take action against, on, within my world and produce a stoppage, an ongoing, an object that without me would not remain, be.

A salesman’s pitch, a preacher’s sermon, a whistling in the dark, you say – I say sure! I say it’s a banter and a babbling whistle, but it is my friend, it is. This is the significant battle, the valorous war. To take a stand against void while accepting its encroachment, to face up to destruction taking names and numbers, to perpetually freeze its moments, stop-gap, isolate and preserve. Seek and destroy.

I think of each shutter-click like a whittling, another shiver off death’s enormous trunk, a cut, a shape and scrape, a form emerges in its waste.

Death will assuredly do its worst. And we are.