Photography

Following yesterday's post woke up this morning to a serious reverie about photography.

And it really struck me, as if for the first time, what an odd business photography was. That you could paste a chemical onto a piece of paper, a chemical fragile enough to be photosensitive but stable enough that, with suitable trickery you could catch and fix the results of that photosensitivity. Fix firmly enough that the resulting prints would last for years and years indoors and maybe some days outdoors. Ground once trodden, many years ago and when rather young, by Oliver Sacks. See reference 1.

From where I move onto eyes, which rather than converting the light into coloured chemicals, converts it into nerve impulses, on the face of it as fragile as the starting light. But then I remembered about the people with photographic memories, people who could look at a page of A4 typescript for a few seconds, then read it off from memory some hours or perhaps days later. Their brains clearly have some neuronic version of fixing going on. Brains which can convert the transient firing of neurons into more or less permanent synaptic connections in a matter of a second or so.

From where I move onto what is I think the even smaller number of people who have photographic memories about their whole lives, a talent which is more of a burden than a blessing. Or is it that we all have photographic memories, but most of us cannot get at them? I dare say one day fairly soon, with the help of some fancy scanner, we will be able to say which, certainly on a case by case basis. See reference 2.

Will I be sufficiently moved by all this to get myself an easy read science & history of photography? Is a visit to Julia Cameron's house on the Isle of Wight indicated, in the course of our annual visit?

With thanks to wikipedia for the Cameron image from 1869, called the kiss of peace. On which subject see also reference 3.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=One+of+the+freebies+picked+up+at+the+Olympia.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/remainder-shelf.html.

Reference 3: https://analyzing19thcentury.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/the-kiss-of-peace/.