The Future as an Act of Remembrance: Objects

Three months before my grandfather died, I photographed him in his assisted care living facility with my mother’s old Rollieflex. I shot all I could of the roll’s 12 exposures, but mid way through, the central gear inside the camera jammed, I couldn’t advance the film any further. 

I developed the roll nonetheless, to find that the jam had dislodged the receiving film axis and had drawn deep scratches across each frame through the entire length of the film. Initially, this was devastating. He was dying, quickly, and while I understood that, I denied it. In the present, our immediate responsibilities seem so overwhelmingly important. I had papers to write, theory to read, photographs to print, I couldn’t go to his birthday party, his condition worsened, but I had work, I had rent to pay, he’d get better enough for me to see him next week when i could afford to come down. He didn’t. 

The next time I photographed him, he was in a pine casket, being lowered into the earth by latin American laborers at  Jewish Cemetery just West of the Five. My sister placed a bouquet of roses atop the coffin, still wrapped in plastic from Vons.  A young Filipino soldier payed the taps in honor of my grandfather’s service in the Korean War. 

In regards to the future, the only thing we can be absolutely sure of is, at some point, it will end. We are moving irrevocably forward towards something, somewhere, and at some point we will get there, and that will be that.  

This axiom, is the only tenant of existence that I am absolutely sure of. 

The analogue offers a small remedy to this truth. 

The photographs I took of my grandfather are covered with traces, lines that came from a camera, given to me by my mother, who was given to me by my grandfather, and who in turn gave me the last photographs of his life. These traces are anachronistic. The images they are drawn upon contain light that reflected off my grandfathers smile and track jacket, the light that bounced off the television behind him playing highlight from the DNC. The light hit my film, it was there, it is still here, residing permanently in archival fibre paper. The traces, formed by the degeneration of my camera's hardware, were as present at the time of their conception as they are now, and forever will be. 

This contingency is the only defense we have to the inevitably of the future. The photograph a mnemonic device, neither here nor there, something liminal that allows us to oscillates between what we know, and what we don’t.