Over the last week Warren and I have been pouring through almost forty years of photographs looking for photos of Mikio. I am struck by how much has changed not only in our bodies but in the technology used to make photos–slides, prints, phones. I look at photos from the ’80s and then in my dreams I wander out of the frame and around familiar rooms, having conversations with family and friends who are long since gone. I am thankful for the impulse to click the shutter at so many events and mundane moments. In the daylight I shuffle around outside considering leaves, the brown curls, tattered edges in piles and drifts. I choose a few specific ones. The camera allows me a transformative moment of appreciation of plant material, pottery, light and memory.
Photography is naively believed to reproduce visual actuality, but in fact the images our eyes take in and the images the camera delivers are not the same. Taking a picture is a transformative act. Avedon’s high-contrast black-and-white photographs render people as we do not see them in life; our eyes spare us the particulars of decrepitude and sickness that the camera almost gloatingly records. In the case of my aged and diseased leaves, the camera exercises another of its transformative capacities: it confers aesthetic value on the apparently plain and worthless.
–Janet Malcolm, from Burdock, The New York Review, August 14 2008