scanning pics... assembling for files... digitizing the Polaroids
Though I wear a Union Jack pillow case on my head, I quote the French writer, Roland Barthes, from Camera Lucida: "The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes call it mild does not contradict its violence: many say sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violent, and I call it so)."

Herve Guibert on Polaroids, from Ghost Image

Confuse the Issue is the scrambled message spray painted on the back of my suit jacket, worn in the attic space of Tom and Mark's house in Northampton, Mass., in Fall 1977. Mark was an avid photographer; there is a section of the Deleted/Extra Scenes on the dvd of the documentary, Silverlake Life, describing Bo Huston and Elaine Mayes going through a cache of photos after Mark had followed Tom in passing from HIV. Mark and I shot lots of the Land Camera Polaroids, and I first began the SX70 self-portraits in my bedroom at their home that fall.



"The pictures weren't good, but it was fun to operate. It was expensive as well, but you didn't have to wait, any reality could be handed back to you at once, in reduced form. Polaroid was initially marketed as a child's toy, though it was an instrument for pornography: it freed the amateur from the constraint of the laboratory....

"It was also suggested that ... photographers work on themes, the self-portrait for example, since the Polaroid lent itself well to this solitary activity--there were no witnesses, and one had total control over the image and over what one wanted to leave behind as image."

(pgs 130-131, translated by R. Bononno, Green Integer 17, 1998)

Barthes on portraiture, sort of

"The portrait-photograph is a closed field of forces. Four image-repertoires intersect here, oppose and distort each other. In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photographer thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares). In terms of image-repertoire, the Photograph (the one I intend) represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter."
pgs. 13-14, translated by R. Howard