Fixing a Shadow
Fixing a shadow.
It’s kind of a curious phrase. Depending upon the definitions you choose for those words, its meaning is open-ended, contradictory, and verges on the poetic,
Fix: to repair; to affix; to settle upon. Fix: a dilemma or jam; to organize or prepare or arrange. Fix: to influence the outcome by an illegal or underhanded means; to neuter.
Shadow seems straightforward in comparison, although its meanings branch out in unexpected ways, too: a dark shape produced by a body coming between rays of light and a surface; an area of opacity. Shadow: proximity; sadness or gloom; an inseparable companion. Shadow: a person secretly following another; to envelop in shadow. (And that’s leaving out the psychological realm - those Jungian archetypes and all that’s hiding within the unconscious, awaiting its alchemical transformation into light.
Just for fun, play mix and match with these definitions. See what combination of meaning you can create. To organize or prepare an inseparable companion . . . To repair sadness or gloom . . .
Before the advent of digital tools, photography was described as “fixing a shadow.” This referred to the fixer, a chemical combination used in the final steps of processing an image onto paper, which stabilized or “fixed” the image, neutralizing its sensitivity to light. Even though this phrase concerns a technical process, I like to think that fixing a shadow was somehow meant to contain all of those additional possible meanings, and others, too, because it acknowledges the magic in photography. It honors the power to make time stand still; photography’s ability to show everything that happens in between the blink of an eye. Indigenous peoples have historically resisted being the subject of photographs because they rightly sensed this power and judged it to be occult,
They believed it capable of revealing and stealing one’s soul - that’s quite a fix to be in!
I came to photography quite late in life. I have only worked with digital images. I’ve never had the experience of being in a darkroom or working with film. (Although #goals, one day I WILL learn how to work with a large format camera!) My closet connection to film is my childhood memory of the narrow strips of Kodak Instamatic film you got back in the envelope, along with your double set of grainy pictures, two days after you dropped a film cartridge off at the drug store to be developed.
But recently, I started playing around with an Instax mini instant camera, one of the popular toy cameras sparked by the revival of Polaroid cameras. On one hand, it couldn’t be easier to use. There are some simple settings, but basically you just point and shoot. On the other hand, it’s hard to work with since you have so little control over the outcome. It’s pretty haphazard.
I didn’t much care for the results it gave at first, especially with the color film. Mostly, it was about nostalgia and the fun of hearing the camera whir before it spits out a small rectangle of film from which an image emerges as it cures. The picture surfacing to light - something from nothing, apparently - is a delightful magic trick.
Even with hit or miss results, I began to fall in love the monochrome images this toy - and it is a toy - could produce. I liked the look of the film image - its precision and softness, the subtlety of the gradations of black and white, and the hundred different shades of gray. The depth in these pictures look and feel nothing like the surfaces in a digital picture. (I’m not saying that one is better than the other; they just capture different things to different effect. It’s never bad to have options.)
One day, I started to fool around with the double exposure setting. I pressed the shutter twice. The camera whirred. The image card came out the side. And my heart began to pound. There, on a 2.25 x 3.5 inch card, resting in my palm, was an image from a dream, encased in a white border. More specifically, a new image which no one had ever seen before - which I had never seen before - and which also technically did not exist, pulled out of the air.
I’m not a technician, so let me explain it like this: A + B = C. It really is as simple as that. Two images layered on top of each other create a third image. But one with so much ambiguity and strangeness and surprise! The more I’ve worked at this, the better I’ve gotten at predicting what a finished picture might look like. Even so, I’m still usually guessing. I can approximate a result, but my fingers remain tightly crossed. I never know what I’ve got until it finishes curing and presents itself. There’s always something unexpected and unplanned.
What I like about these pictures - I think - is their sense of in-betweeness, as if one is moving between worlds and simply stopped for a moment. Or that, in one instant of crossing over each other, shadows have been fixed.
You blink your eyes and, well, a hidden world appears.
New relationships, unexpected intimacies, unfamiliar stories form, each with the peculiar logic of dreams or memory, each longing to be unraveled, each clinging to the stubbornness of its mystery: A man walks down a street only to pause as he feels a hand touch his heart. A woman gazes upon herself in a mirror which is hung in a forest of umbrella pines. A lost dog, wet and cold, grows hands. A pear rests on a table doesn’t it? An antique woman remembers a dress, the form of a dress, that was not hers. An engraving of Watteau’s Gilles from the Louvre whispers to itself, “The artist has nothing but . . . convictions . . . ”
That’s what the surfaces of the images in this newsletter indicate. What they mean or suggest, I can’t say. I will leave that up to you. Please let me know what story they tell you. What I can say is that they are from a work-in-progress, Songs of Disaster and Forgiveness. That name, like the project itself, came to me whole in a dream. All of the images making these simple double exposures are found images, most from books in my home, most from books - but not all - about photographers I love.
I’m usually quite superstitious about sharing work before it’s done but I’m trying to grow more comfortable in spaces that are in between. So much of my life at the moment is in a state of in between, with things not fully started nor fully finished, just overlapping, ambiguous and strange, and full of surprise. New relationships, unexpected intimacies, unfamiliar stories take shape, or, at least the possibility of them, anyway, along with the belief that what is elusive - like shadows - might one day be fixed.
P.S. If you’re interested, there is a whole school of photography made with toy cameras. The supreme example, with images of astounding beauty, is the photographic essay, Iowa, by Nancy Rexroth made in 1977 with the plastic Diana camera. It’s ample proof that it’s never the tool that makes the art, but rather the hand that uses it.
(Click on the image to see full size.)
