THE PHOTOGRAPHER (1949)
BY BOO BOO WILKES
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The photographer has an inexpensive camera. The photographer’s hair announces his withering, a sign announces a development, a moment announces another series of moments that either announce a continuation or an end. He positions himself in the approximate center of his rectangular room, and snaps every angle. The photographer perceives inanimate objects with miniature loudspeakers projecting their thin and probably electronically translated voices directly into his ears. He uses five rolls of thirty-six exposures. Each foot of his room translates into roughly an inch of developed film. It’s a process of compression. There is no secret text behind every object, but everything has something to say. He thinks aloud, everything is loaded with details and shades. Without intuition, and without informed hypothesis, human life on this planet would be swimming. In order to represent each corner of the room, the floorspace and ceiling included, accumulations of lint and cobwebs, peeling paint and hasty painting, the photographer at first methodically aims at a section of wall, shoots, then aligns the left border with an approximation of the last shot’s right border, moving horizontally to the end of the wall, then he returns back and across, aligning the next level’s uppermost border with the lower border of the first shot, and so on, until each rectangular plot of wall, ceiling, and floor is rolled tightly and unexposed in film. Hearing these announcements is inseparable from human intelligence, the photographer thinks. If you are unaware of your surroundings then you’re an inanimate object that announces a sadness, a complicity, a wasteful comfort that you never suspected yourself of projecting. Then the photographer quickly, haphazardly whirls, shooting various angles of the room from eccentric positions, the room as seen from a wall, from above the bed, seizing it all from underrepresented angles, unfamiliar angles, angles he’s never noticed. After he picks up the film at the local strip mall, the photographer covers two large sliding closet doors with photographs of his room, not in order of snaps, but after repeatedly shuffling the five rolls of film like a deck of cards, the 180 shots spread against the closet doors in a random arrangement of wall, ceiling, and floor. The photographer collects the details of his perceptions, fearful that if he cannot select and arrange the reality that presents itself to him, then he will become an absolute waste, an inanimate object himself. Just a slew of images stuck to the closet doors with blue putty, all of these uncertain announcements spewed in fragments, disjointed, not like grunts, not even like intelligible utterances, but narrow flashes and clips, sudden heavings in the photographer’s room, inseparable from all that sprawling density of which he and they are a part. [Forever after at http://eyeshot.net/booboo.html]
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