cixa : Ephemerides : Autoportrait of a Tampon-Chimp http://cixa.org/ephemerides/tampon-chimp.php
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5124/5315166399_559d5b4e83.jpg In November 1948 the Polaroid Corporation started selling the Land Camera Model 95: the first instant camera with self-developing film. The ideas contained within this camera date back many decades: to house everything needed to produce a photographic image within a single package. Polaroid was the first to realise the complex mechanisms needed. Polaroid was also a savvy marketer; they combined cutting-edge technology with catchy advertisements for their products. The Polaroid Swinger jingle went: Swing it up! {yeah yeah} It says YES {yeah yeah} Take the shot {yeah yeah} Count it down {yeah yeah} Zip it off!6 See also: Songs of the Darkroom. During the eight months I spent holed up in a camera1 2 4 5 I started making photographic prints of what lay outside my home. This led to a number of images1 2 3 4 5. Eventually I turned the camera inwards, photographing things that lay within the camera itself7. The camera being my home, this gave me a bunch of objects to photograph. Now in Italy if you go up to a photo-booth, the machine spits out a single card containing ten images of your face: four on top and six at the bottom. Four euros for the whole thing. Bring change. If you flip it over it says "Postcard" in English. It is all quite lovely. When I walked around town I would look for these photo-booths. Sometimes they would have a single postcard stuck on the outside, pinned up against the plastic facade. Perhaps these were advertisements; perhaps some poor soul was in a hurry and forgot all about them and left them behind, left with a vague memory of a misplaced posession. I started collecting these images. I found them in Treviso, in Venice, in Milan, in Udine, in Padova, and in Rome. There were all sorts of faces: some posed, some harried, some beatific. There were Ecuadorians near the Questura, earnest and worried; Polish cleaning-ladies near the train station with their angular cheeks and bulbous noses; Ghanaians with kohl-daubed cheeks; Mixtecs & Toltecs & Olmecs of all kinds. Imagine my surprise when I chanced upon a peculiar set of images near the Piazza dei Popoli in Rome. A booth by a pine tree with a single postcard hanging from a thumbtack. Ten faces stared back at me. My own face, multiplied. Four-and-six. The visage was the same, the beard perhaps a little less scraggly. I looked for something that would distinguish myself from what lay in front, like some distorted mirror from my past that I had overlooked. I had never been to this piazza before; in fact, this was my first time in Rome. I took the postcard home with me. I could afford to be less stealthy - this was, apparently, an autoportrait - but the thrill and guilt that theft brings remained. The following images were made by taping photographic paper onto the LCD screen of a Canon G11. This image e.g.: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5124/5315166399_559d5b4e83.jpg was made with the camera held at arm's length. The G11 displays the image taken for a few seconds after having written it to flash memory. These few seconds of image display are often the focal point of convergence of author and subject, colloquially known as chimping9. It is quite something to make a photo with a flash in complete darkness, as this photo was. The paper I use is monochromatic and is safe to handle in red-light. The four-odd seconds of LCD display acted as exposure. Since I shot this in my bedroom-darkoom, I was able to develop it right away. Developing what is a digital photograph exposed to paper is subtle. Gone is the immediacy of seeing what was captured on flat screens and glowing colours. Instead you must wait while the paper is bathed, through the many distortions that developer acid in a darkroom causes. Colour is washed away; only the highlights remain. The LCD of the G11 has a lip that runs around it. This prevents the paper from resting smack on top of the screen. This distance - in millimetres - causes the diffusion you see here. http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5009/5315166259_52741ce01c.jpg The multiple views you see here are when I started using the G11 as a stamp. A stamp made of light, you see, is noiseless. Two transformations - mirroring and inversion - are apparent. Flipping the paper over adds two more, since photopaper is translucent. The flipped stamps develop as positives as you can see above. This is my instamatic; this is my Polaroid Land camera; my photo-booth postcard; my self-developing photographic apparatus housed in a single package. It isn't the most portable of machines. Here are some more: El Chupacabron: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5049/5316183029_30dd92bf4a.jpg http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5086/5316182791_9afb29d800.jpg Autoportrait of a Tampon-Chimp: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5124/5315166399_559d5b4e83.jpg http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5089/5315166329_815c9f01dd.jpg Henriette Kruse: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5289/5316201629_a4cd34dbde.jpg Jono Brandel: http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5207/5316792748_51ba252625.jpg http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5168/5316792018_c16f5c6c46.jpg I still do not know of how those ten autoportraits found their way to me. None of my friends will fess up to it. It is indeed my face. I have never lost my memory - or atleast I don't remember losing it - and yet I cannot place these photographs. They remain a mystery. Aditya Mandayam 2011.01.02 Venice, Italy and Białystok, Poland References 1. Mandayam, Aditya. cixa: Ephemerides: (sic{sic[sic]}). 2010.12.31. NetBehaviour. http://www.netbehaviour.org/pipermail/netbehaviour/20101231/018881.html (accessed 2010.12.31). 2. Mandayam, Aditya. Laptopogram. http://cixa.org/works/laptopogram.php (accessed 2010.12.30). 3. Mandayam, Aditya. The Tangible Ephemerides of the Ha-Ha Preterite. 2010.11.23. Photo-Levallois. http://www.photo-levallois.org/edition-2010/accueil.html (accessed 2010.12.30). 4. Mandayam, Aditya. cixa: Ephemerides: Memory & the Mechanical Eye. 2010.29.12. NetBehaviour. http://www.netbehaviour.org/pipermail/netbehaviour/20101229/018850.html (accessed 2010.12.29). 5. Mandayam, Aditya. cixa: Ephemerides: Kamrā. 2010.29.30. NetBehaviour. http://www.netbehaviour.org/pipermail/netbehaviour/20101230/018868.html (accessed 2010.12.30). 6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7k2uwJmwxo 7. Mandayam, Aditya. Bar-Bar Bar-Bar. http://cixa.org/works/laptopogram.php (accessed 2011.01.02). 8. Mandayam, Aditya. cixa: Ephemerides: Autoportrait of a Tampon-Chimp. 2010.01.02. NetBehaviour. (accessed 2010.01.02). 9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimping _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
