Archive for March 22nd, 2008
This is not a book.
In 2000, Issue 162 of Aperture Magazine contained my brief introduction to a group of New York-based visually impaired photographers; the interviews were conducted when I was then an Assistant Editor at Aperture and was working on the accompanying book, entitled “Shooting Blind”. Some images never entered the book.
At the time, one of the photographers, a woman in her eighties, who died a year later, asked me if I would model nude for her. I couldn’t turn down her request because her enthusiasm for nudity was old-fashioned and innocent and because she was my elder. But the photo could not be included in the book that I was editing and she was in. That was our agreement. I went to her apartment in Upper Manhattan and we took the images with the help of her assistant. The lights were dark and she used a flashlight to illuminate the body, my body. Later, she would have to subject the photos to enormous powers of magnification to see what she had made. I saw the contraption in her bedroom- a beige machine- blowing up letters, mechanically engorging images with volume and light.
Metaphorically, these vestigal images that exist within the body of work but outside of the publication are a strange monstrosity– extra and excommunicated. Although the excised photos are almost eclipsed by what has been disseminated,they still lie in the dark of the editor’s head. They reorganize themselves: here is Victorine Floyd-Flood’s self-portrait- where her bony, dark-skinned face melts against a smear of dimly lit ancient and flower-patterned wallpaper. There is the image of me, stretched out, thin, white, and naked on a couch. My skin is glowing but the head appears severed from the body; a strip of darkness cuts across the throat.
The book that was not a book.
These imaginary archives and manuscripts that only pose as book aren’t unmentionable or unheard of.
Marguerite Duras speaks of the night that is a book. Paul Gaugain continuously declares that his publication,“Avec et Apres” will not exist as the object you presume it to be: “This is not a book.”
And it charms; that he tells us that what we hold in our hands cannot be. And these images also resist common assumptions of what cannot be – that interior vision wends its way to the surface- erupting in images that may be too baroque or sweet or hungry for our tastes. It can embarrass us – a book that is weird and light-pocked and personalized. Although, I’m glad this book does not align itself with the current ‘cool’, I also long for the other book- unsupportable, unpublished.
The original Aperture article by M.W.Blackburn: shooting-blind.doc
