POLAROID BOOK

A small collection of things looked at (moments of distraction or fragments of a world):  some skies - blue or grey, a street light turning on at dusk, a billboard in the desert, a tree shadow on the sidewalk, a view of the horizon east in the Atlantic or west in the Pacific, a pier in Connie Island, the fog in Santa Monica, a small port-town in North Carolina, a path into trees in Cape Cod, Palos Verdes.

If the tour started on the West Coast and not in Salt Lake City, there would have been polaroids of Wendover, a small town on the Nevada and Utah border.  Here, over half a century ago, the Enola Gay was built and test runs for the atomic bomb droppings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki took place.  Old weathered barracks that have been abandoned.  An old airplane hangar.  Would anyone know the fertile history of a polaroid of a barren landscape?  

Or looking up at the night sky in the middle of the night at a gas station somewhere a few miles driving past Sand Creek.  The stars look so beautiful here, and they can enthrall you even in the cold.  But if I pointed the camera up all there would be is black.  The stars would never make it into the emulsion.

Now I am on a plane from New York to Reykjavik.  The window faces south over the Atlantic.  It is dawn and the sun is about to rise.  The moon, a waning crescent (almost a new moon), is already above the horizon.  At first I do not realize what it is.  It glimmers with the golden light of a sun that has not yet risen.  All I can comprehend is the light.  Slowly I learn it is the moon.  This reminds me of the line in that John Berger book you showed me.  If I had a camera that could capture this, this visual incomprehension - that is the photograph I would mail you.  Or, at the least, it would be the moon.

David Horvitz

May 2007

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