Today’s post comes from Bella Dalton-Fenkl, class of 2020 and Art Center student docent.
“What Was Lost?”
—for Judy Fiskin’s The End of Photography
From the second-floor bench, I watch the jittery, grain-filled clips flash onscreen.
I listen. It amuses me, usually. “No more sheet of glass. No more squeegee.”
Not that I can’t understand. If my house was razed to the ground,
I’d mourn it all. Down to my glass hummingbird. Down to my bottle of Mod Podge.
When I hear the narration from below, on the ground floor,
as I stare into the oculus, past the museum’s roof, past Taylor, and into the cyan sky,
the voice gasps, stutters—descends into a drone,
and Joan Chodorow sounds more like HAL 9000
begging for his life as his cores are plucked one by one. “No more stop. No more fix.
…No more photography.”
But darkrooms always remain.
