Untitled Document

 

THE PAGE OF “EMULSION LIFTS”

The practice of lifting the emulsion from a Polaroid picture and of transferring it afterwards on another surface was born as a game, as a way of trying a technique which requires many experiments but which guarantees surprising and educational results. Indeed, this practice is a turning point for the photographic language, and it is interesting to consider that certain images are more suitable than others for this practice.

Once the first experiments have been carried out, the necessary manual experience has been acquired and a standard set of rules has been set, the shocking intuition can take place, or at least what we believe to be the sudden enlightenment. We might act in the same way as the famous Italian photographer Ugo Mulas in his Verifiche (Verifications), and see the Zen nature of the picture.

Everything is in a process of constant change, everything has a continuous and orderly motion, like the waves breaking on the seashore and receding. They move back and forth in a persistent and unperturbed way, they are always close and always far, they always seem to leave but then they come again.

The same is true for pictures. Whether they are in a drawer, in an album or in a frame, whether they are all together or all scattered, given as a present, lost or forgotten, they are not the “end product” of our photographic activity anymore. Indeed, if we go back to the very beginning, we find the negatives, which are the source of our recollections. These small pieces of film witnessed, in the darkest point of a camera, an infinitesimal moment of our life or of other people’s life.

We can and we have to bring these negatives, these forgotten moments, back to life, and this will enable us to understand the real nature of the constant change in ourselves and in the known world.

Expressions, bodies, behaviours, words, thoughts, moments, hours, actions, days. Everything will come back to life.

Because everything is Zen, everything is a constant change.

Photography too.

Our memory too.

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