One thing I think about when I think about photography is reproduction. “Drawing from life” is another form of reproduction, a strategy of mark making that attempts to reproduce certain 3-dimensional subjects on a 2-dimensional piece of paper. But the kind of reproduction that I think about in relation to photography has less to do with that desire to capture the world on paper than it does with the need to create a multiple: a singular image that can be accessed in a multitude of places and times. To provide a counter example, I consider the individual human as unique, not multiple; an individual human is restrained to a singular body, in a singular space. When I think about photography and reproduction, I think about the way that any number of humans, in any number of spaces, can access the “same” image.
I love conversations about how “digital” reproduction is somehow distinct from “analog” reproduction, but I admit that my current meditation is otherwise. Any photograph means something unique to me on Tuesday and something different when I look at it, or a reproduction of it, on Wednesday.
It would seem that nothing remains the same, regardless of material, place, or time.
Works of painting and sculpture would seem to have straightforward relationship to “uniqueness.” The artist makes the work and hopefully finds a place outside the studio for it to exist, the artist can then perceive a lack of that particular work in their life. I have rarely, if ever, known this experience of “missing” an artwork; as a photographer I always hold onto a negative or digital file and can access the image at any point in time. Considering the notion of a unique work, I decided to load photosensitive paper into my camera, as opposed to the traditional method of loading photosensetive film into the camera. Film is initially sensitive to light, and once developed it remains partially translucent. Film is made this way so that light can shine through it onto light sensitive paper, producing a photographic reproduction print. By loading paper into my camera instead of film, I bypassed the film: the essence of traditional reproduction, making instead a relatively unique image on paper.
Now… for the subject matter of the image in question: I must return to this notion of reproduction and the physical im/possibility of it. I look at a reproduction on Tuesday and it is different still from my viewing of it on Wednesday. And so….. I took some 20 photographic prints of the sky and I made a small pile of them on the ground. On top of the pile I placed two small rocks, and I hoped that that rocks would hold the prints down- keep them in place like a paperweight- keep things from shifting about and changing position in space and in time. But this task in im/possible. I mounted the photographic print, and I designed a frame for good measure, but still… it refuses to keep still, as I understand it.
