A woman holds a length of 35mm film across her own eyes, one hand at each temple, fingers spread, nails a dark lacquered red. The strip is long enough to reach ear to ear and is held taut, sprocket holes running along its top and bottom edges, the frames within it going from black at the left to a burnt orange-red at the right where something — a face, possibly — is dissolving into the emulsion. Her mouth is dark red beneath it. She wears a black leather jacket with jewelled buttons. The ground is white.
Everything about the strip says that it is a negative and that it has failed: fogged at one end, over-dense at the other, no legible image anywhere along it. This is the part of photography that used to be thrown away, the discard from the light table. Here it has been turned around and made into an object of adornment, held up at exactly the height where a pair of dark glasses would sit.
Which produces a small and precise joke about the medium. The material invented to make seeing permanent has been placed where it prevents seeing altogether; the sitter is blindfolded with the very substance that would otherwise be recording her. And she holds it there herself, deliberately, with both hands — while the camera in front of her goes on working in a format that no longer requires film at all. The strip in her fingers is already an antique. The photograph it interrupts is not.
A woman holds a length of 35mm film across her own eyes, one hand at each temple, fingers spread, nails a dark lacquered red. The strip is long enough to reach ear to ear and is held taut, sprocket holes running along its top and bottom edges, the frames within it going from black at the left to a burnt orange-red at the right where something — a face, possibly — is dissolving into the emulsion. Her mouth is dark red beneath it. She wears a black leather jacket with jewelled buttons. The ground is white.
Everything about the strip says that it is a negative and that it has failed: fogged at one end, over-dense at the other, no legible image anywhere along it. This is the part of photography that used to be thrown away, the discard from the light table. Here it has been turned around and made into an object of adornment, held up at exactly the height where a pair of dark glasses would sit.
Which produces a small and precise joke about the medium. The material invented to make seeing permanent has been placed where it prevents seeing altogether; the sitter is blindfolded with the very substance that would otherwise be recording her. And she holds it there herself, deliberately, with both hands — while the camera in front of her goes on working in a format that no longer requires film at all. The strip in her fingers is already an antique. The photograph it interrupts is not.