A "melancholy pastness"
Kaja Silverman (along with others) has written of photography’s “memorial value” – its “melancholy pastness”. (Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy: Or The History of Photography, Part 1)
In 1977, Ricardo and I visited the World Trade Center. Can you see us?
Back in Massachusetts, in my darkroom, I made several prints from a single negative and mounted them on the card you see above. It’s worn now and its original greys have turned to browns in places, though I was never one to print in sepia.
Some pieces:
It was life before the digital era, the days of darkrooms where you live. Student days, creating days, young love days when home was a ground floor flat on Graves Avenue in Northampton, Massachusetts.
I recall the day I made these prints. There was a whiffle ball game outside my darkroom. I stopped to photograph the game. Here, our friend Bob sits on the porch. I don’t now recall the name of the batter:
Bob’s friend Em is the catcher. Em died in 1993 at the age of forty.
Here is Em, waiting for his ‘at-bat’:
Meanwhile, in the darkroom, apparitions in the developer tray, people wait to be sped upwards in elevators that race ten floors at a time to the top of the tower.
I look at what I have made, leave it out for a few months, then put it away to make room for something else.
I don’t look at it again for a long time.
Decades later, after Isaac is born (1988), after many times are gone by, and after the towers come down (2001), I take a ballpoint pen to the print, so that Isaac might see Ricardo and me, that we were there once, should he find this old thing after us.
I put it away again.
This is a personal memory, written on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. But it is not written without thought for those who died on the day and during the 20 tragic years of war that followed. For an important and sadly all-too-prescient essay published soon after the towers came down, I recommend Arundhati Roy’s “The Algebra of Infinite Justice”.