Andreas Haugstrup Pedersen | solitude.dk

Someone who is not me invested in a polaroid camera despite the recent news that the polaroid company will cease to produce film (of course this also meant that the camera was extremely cheap). The process and the results are very exciting. The above video shows you the 4 minute development process in just under one minute. There's no audio.

Tomorrow it will be 6 months since Richard clarified his view on photography and video. To mark the occasion I will post a quote by Roland Barthes from Rhetoric of the Image and pretend I have another 6 months to write a proper reply. Perhaps it's a red herring, a stalling technique. Hopefully it's food for thought.

[…] The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjuction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this denoted message or message without code that the real unreality of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now, for the photograph is never experienced as illusion, is in no way a presence (claims as to the magical character of the photographic image must be deflated); its reality that of the having-been-there, for in every photograph there is always the stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered. […]

Yes, I had to look up stupefying. Next week: Why French authors prefer semi-colon over period and avoid commas altogether.