Paper/Photograph
We make marks on paper not because it is blank, but because it is white. Because some things are much easier to penetrate than others, and light is one of them. Marks are made by layering, obstructing the bounce-off of rays hitting the surface, slathering on something that will absorb, yawn and consume instead – odd that adding something new to a page can be like chiseling something else away. I sometimes imagine that the pen-marks in my margins, the doodled swirls on the ends of floating letters are engraved there, cracked deep into the marble of my notebook, and that into every black chasm trickles all the other things I should have scrawled there instead, like falling pebbles along a fault-line.
Photographs are similar, but not quite the same – darkness seems to pool along the planes of negatives as though there were already dips and wells to hold it, pressed in by the gush of light as the shutter opened, the areas of hardest impact caving simultaneously to a sharp inky inhale; the blackness relegated to the surface instead of the depths, the blackness imprinted instead of somehow unearthed. If the shutter were to stay open or the back of the camera clicked ajar, the negative would swim black, almost pretending to capture that hollow dark space behind the closed shutter doors. A different blankness. This one is harder to chip away at, harder to force into pools or one choice form. The inside of the camera, the close-up of the pupil, the night sky – all melt evenly, darkly, over the surface, the same mysterious expanse.
