The following is a slightly edited transcript of a narrative I wrote at the Grandstand on 21/03/2014, for use within my performance. I include it here for documentary purposes.
There are still people who believe that, if you’re caught in a photograph, a small part of you is taken, captured within a frame. Photographs as moments, held in stasis, frozen. When you think of it that way, the photographer – or photographic assistant – wields a lot of power. Behind a lens, with the godlike choice of whether to destroy a moment, to crush it and push it and flatten it into a single, static negative. Maybe that’s not destruction. Maybe that’s creation. Either way, there’s a responsibility which comes with it that you have to take seriously.
Imagine the photograph doesn’t exist until an hour, or a day, or a week after you first press the shutter release. Imagine that moment is just trapped inside that light-sealed box – your camera – and the only way to set it free is to develop the film, and print the picture. But it isn’t the same thing as what you captured. In bringing the image into creation, you’ve destroyed what trace of the original moment remained, and the thing you have is a very different thing to the live moment you decided to encapture.
That’s responsibility.
You’ll see on the table in front of you that there are some pieces of photographic paper. Take one of them. The first tray you’ll see on the table in front of you is filled with developer, a type of chemical which will develop the image. You need to place the paper, face down, into the chemical.
Imagine someone, a photographer, at a race. The finish line, lining up the perfect shot. And it needs to be perfect, because that photograph will decide the race, will win or lose bets, will make or ruin a day, will bolster or destroy marriages. And then imagine, just a few years later and on the same spot, with the same photographer, but he’s photographing bodies now. The civilian war dead, brought to this site, earmarked as a mortuary.
“They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.
Time shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
Frozen, static within photographs, we will remember them.”
Take the photograph out of the developer, but keep it face down. The second tray is filled with a chemical which will stop the developing process. Just do the same as last time. Pop it in.
Imagine the photograph as being this building. The idea, captured, is finally developed. The act of creation destroys the original idea – it’s no longer needed. The thing is constructed, the bricks and mortar assembled; an act of creation, like the printing of a photograph. And then it’s put somewhere, and is forgotten, and it slowly fades until just the blurs of faces and colours can be made out, if you look hard, as traces of its history. Frozen and forgotten in time, this place is a photograph of a building, still kept in the album but barely looked at. Just there.
Take the photograph out of that tray, then. Swap it into the third bath, which will fix the image, permanently capturing it within the paper. It won’t take long.
64, 63, 62, 61, 60, 59, 58, 57, 56, 55, 54, 53, 52, 51, 50, 49, 48, 47, 46, 45, 44, 43, 42, 41, 40, 39, 38, 37, 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…
Done. Take it out, quickly, and pop it into the water. Just a quick dip. And then pass it here.
A photograph is an end. The final product of a process; the end of an exposure; the dying breath of a moment in time which won’t ever be experienced again. It’s a final moment, and it’s fixed. And you’ve done an excellent job with this ending. You’ve developed your photo finish.
I’ll peg it up to dry.
Notes on the transcript
The narrative itself came out of a process of exploration of the role of the photograph within traditional and experimental forms of theatre, and through continuing discussion with Michael Pinchbeck and also classmates about the ideas surrounding photography and how the idea of the creation and development of the photograph could become an extended metaphor for the development and subsequent decline of the Grandstand.
The idea of the ‘photo finish’ came out of an informal pitch made to the class and to Michael and Conan Lawrence (Pinchbeck and Lawrence, 2014) some time into the process. With the history of the Grandstand being so bound up in its original purpose, linked to the racecourse, the idea of the photograph’s purpose within horse racing – the photo finish, captured to establish a winner – seemed a logical conclusion.
The lines of poetry in the middle of the narrative are taken from the ‘Ode of Remembrance’ from Laurence Binyon’s poem For The Fallen (Binyon, n.d.). It is a re-imagining of a standard remembrance poem hashed out about the war dead every year which links the idea of freezing or holding part of a person in stasis within the photograph to the large-scale civilian casualties seen during the war, linking to the Grandstand’s planned purpose during the war as a mortuary.
Throughout I attempt to use photographic terminology. For instance: capture, negative, develop, print, exposure.
The countdown towards the end of the piece not only provides a temporal structure, a measure of time that suggests both an inevitable journey towards an ending point, and the sort of measurement of time that one would use within the process of developing a photograph. The countdown begins at 64, a reference to 1964 as the year in which racing at the Grandstand ceased and it became static and fixed.
References:
Binyon, L. (n.d.) The Ode. [online] Sydney: The Australian Army. Available from: http://www.army.gov.au/Our-history/Traditions/The-Ode [Accessed 21 March 2014].
Pinchbeck, M. and Lawrence, C. (2014) Site-specific performance pitches. [seminar] Site Specific Performance DRA2035M-1314, University of Lincoln, 6 March.