I recently read an amazing article by Catherine Lord titled The Art of Losing. It was a beautiful, detailed description of the relationship between Lord and her ex-lover. The material was based on photographs taken by and/or of the couple.
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Flower alert, we used to say on walks around the neighborhood or in the country, a signal to look, to cradle, to inhale. A code, our code. We don’t bother to learn their names, preferring to discuss each particular instance of sexual delirium in the language we already speak. A bee landing on the broad lower lip of a foxglove, fumbling inside, staggering back drunk, sticky, legs breaded with yellow. The entire thorned roundness of a barrel cactus swelling dark red among the rocks, prophecy of eruption. The cream throat of a burgundy daylily, the green veined shaft of an amaryllis, sweet wet cupped in the hollows of heliconia. Hummingbirds suspended, thrumming for the perfect pitch to lick nectar from deep violet mouths, moths groping in the dark for honey suckle, white fingers laced in the beard of blue iris, the magnificent pornography of orchids.
Just some background information on Lord: she is an artist, writer, professor, and scholar, whose challenging photography and writing explores feminist, queer, colonial, and cultural themes though language and image (http://alumni.harvard.edu/stories/catherine-lord-70-recieves-harvard-arts-medal).
The Art of Losing, though never stated, and definitely not written in the likeness of, is a critical work. Although the majority of the article is filled with vivid visual writings (such as the passage I quoted above), we are subtly reminded of her thesis: that photography steals.
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We want memories. We discard the present to gamble on a past. I operate the machinery of loss. You let me.
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It could be an ad for one of those organizing systems that aim straight at the abject fear of the slovenly, but these are insurance photos, a simple inventory of the loot in your undeclared war against the rich, or the middle class, or anyone who had money to burn, no matter how provisionally or imprudently.
I will post later how the archive (as an impossible objective entity) is visible in my own work. For now, I want to leave you with more of Lord’s words:
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It is easier to remember your back thin against my cheek, or the sound of your car on the hill outside our house, than it is to endure these snapshots. I have carried them in a small black box to Lake Como, where a man invented photography because he envied his wife’s ability to draw. I arrange them across my desk. After I write out each one, I shut it back up, Pandora refiguring the odds.
