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Willa Mamet
Life is finite.
The possibilities of life are infinite, but life is finite. So,
too,is a roll of film. There are thirty-six exposures, maybe thirty-seven,
but never forty. You can't see what you've done yet; so you'd
better be able to know if you got the Shot.
There is only so
much time- so much film- with which to do what one must. HUman
capacity is limited. " I am not God. I am not capable of
everything." Then consider digital media; " I can edit
indefinitely. I can shoot indefinitely." But one cannot do
anything indefinitely, and so we, in succumbing to a vision of
a digital world, succumb also to the fallacy of unlimited capacity.
We start to think we are God. But we are not God. We are not endlessly
capable. We are- each according to our own understanding- souls
or energy or happenstance, but inarguably bodies, rooted in a
finite physical and emotioal experience of the Universe.
Can you locate
a pixel? Can you touch it? Do you know what it smells like? Does
it affect your senses in any way, affect your person? How does
it change the way you look at things without pixels? Do you notice?
Do you mind?
There's something
in the rhythm of film that's enlivening. There's an organic rightness
in waiting for something to happen, living through the stages
of actual process.
Immediacy is unnatural.
To wait for the film, wait for the proofs, wait as the paper chamnges
in the developer, wait while the print washes and dries and finally
arrives as a Photograph in your hands: all of these stages hold
mystery.
Mystery teaches
me patience, didication, preseverance.
