nonsite

How small can an image be to still resonate? I’ve been thinking a great deal about images and remembering what I think is probably the only photograph my father has of his father. It a small image no more than one inch tall, and yet it carries so much presence- and has such an aura. I also am recalling an exhibition we saw in Barcelona a few years ago of surrealist photographers and some of the images were contact prints- framed in large mats,a nd I remember being struck, not only be how beautiful they were, but also by what a great presence they had- particularly in relation to how big everything else seems to be.

I’ve also been struck by how easy it is now to make a print and I think the impulse is to enlarge. I think my plan it is research smallness, things that are a modest scale. I’m going to dig out my old negs and look at them again. This sounds so nostalgic, but I think there’s something there.

Somehow I got around to researching Edwin Land today. It was because I remembered Land Polaroid cameras and polarizing filters. What a great story! Similar in many ways to Claude Russell and compression theory. Both ended up working for the military during the war- Russell on encryption and Land on target finders and stereoscopic viewing systems.

I found this amazing photograph of a thin film polarizer, which got me thinking further about my ideas about smallness.

Further to this there are many photographs that are now part of the creative commons, are available to be used openly, many images that are part of explaining scientific terms and ideas. This is a wonderful resource that should be researched further.