John Offenbach
Remembering, Forgetting, Remembering Again
Summary
I remember photographing a bear in a kitchen, once. I also remember photographing the Empire State Building, the Chrysler, and Flatiron buildings in Manhattan. Those three graces of photographic folklore. I remember photographing streets in Mumbai, in Paris and in Los Angeles. La Cienega. I remember castles and catacombs, and coastlines. I remember photographing a spiral staircase, cantilevered. It was in. I was looking up into its bloom-like form. It was old, over a century at least, and made from pale stone. Stone always looks so good, so delicate, in photographs. Its subtle skin translates like a pencil drawing onto the negative: the silver grains pick up the story from there. I think it was in France, somewhere. Definitely in France.
Looking back at a life of picture-taking, the negatives remain. They are the index, the legend. They are the ups and downs, the here and theres. They point, nudge, and give clues. They are the reminder of the places and the people. Friends and colleagues, some still close, others with whom contact has been lost along the way. Bill, Scott, Eric. The stone staircase, Tanlay. It was in Tanlay, I remember. These things, they come and go, like lacunas. Remembering, forgetting, remembering again.
Sample Text One - From The Introduction
Memories are made on Kodak. In 1975, the film manufacturer produced a TV commercial called ‘The Times of Your Life’. The short film featured a soundtrack by singer Paul Anka, with somewhat syrupy, sentimental lyrics by Bill Lane, ‘you wake up and time has slipped away. And suddenly it’s hard to find, the memories you left behind.’
I get older. My hair changes black to white, black and white, a greyscale marking time, and I reflect on the past. Over time I have gathered a substantial number of negatives, which now form my archive. They constitute a life in photography, and, metaphorically speaking, are an index of my memories. They are the trace of me.
The negatives are central to my research. Normally we are very precious about photographic negatives. We keep them sleeved, in acid-free conservation tissue. We store them, sometimes in environmentally controlled rooms. We catalogue them, cross-reference them like national treasures. They are our offspring. But I don’t mind. What if the information contained within them, the episodic memory, is removed or remade, forgotten or cast aside? What is embedded in them that might change when it is reused, translated, or transformed. How does ageing affect my memory? Do I decay?
In a passage from Moyra Davey’s Index Cards, the artist reflects; ‘I rehearse lost and found almost daily […] I rack my brain, flipping through books, magazines, newspapers trying to retrace my steps. Often the thing I am looking for is of dubious significance […] or it can cut across deep time into a twenty-year archive of negatives. When I find the object, the relief is palpable’.
I can sympathise.
Sample Text Two
I am making isogenic artworks. First, I find a suitable negative from my archive. I have many, possibly hundreds. I like to find a negative that is old, highlighting the passage of time, and that is also of something specific and interesting; something memorable, in fact. This is important, because I will destroy the image. In doing so there is a jolt. It is not without some emotion that I remove the memory, the trace of the memory from the negative. Initially, I use a household tool. A blade on a plastic handle, the kind you can buy in any DIY shop. Having pre-soaked the negative in water, I scrape the blade slowly across its surface. The gel slips off easily and resembles a gossamer-thin black slippery membrane.
In the studio, for subject matter, I reference my original images. That stone staircase from Tanlay is one. Grain imagery from an electron microscope is another. And artefacts found on my negatives: from names, dates and notes jotted on the selvedge to scratchings and the razed remnants of the film itself, are all considered for reawakening. Everything has a new value. A new importance.
Thesis
