Jonathan Rossney

A R T & W O R D S : J O N A T H A N R O S S N E Y

1

'[We had] some photographs taken ... I hope that someday we will have enough money to have the pictures developed ... They are in suspension now, like seeds in a package. ' (Richard Brautigan)

2

I opened the back of the camera to look inside. It was a very old Kodak folding brownie from sometime before the Second World War, gathering dust on a shelf in an antique shop in a small rural town in Ireland. Curled up on one side of the camera's interior was a roll of film marked 'exposed' . I asked the somewhat bemused proprietor if I could buy the roll for €5. Once home, I developed it as best I could considering its likely age - 60 years at least - and the fact that film deteriorates badly over time if not stored correctly. When I took the roll out of the chemicals and hung it up to dry, it looked completely black, but when I shone a torch through it I could see on one frame the barely visible shape of a person. So I scanned it onto my laptop and used every editing trick in the book to pull a usable

The Photograph

image out of the clotted murk of the decades' old negative, which left me with a badly damaged photograph of a woman on a ferry (I think) at some point in the 20th century.

3

It was a beautiful morning. They were both tired, but happy to be on the boat at last. The sea was calm, and they went up on deck to watch the land recede into the hazy distance until it was no longer visible. She lit a cigarette. He took out his camera and asked if he could take her picture. She nodded, and posed while he composed the shot, checking the light and adjusting the shutter speed and aperture to get the best exposure. There was an almost imperceptible click as the shutter opened and closed again. She relaxed and brought the cigarette to her lips, inhaling the smoke while he wound the film on to the next frame. He may have taken other pictures on the same journey, but they are lost forever.

4

She did not know that the film would remain in the camera for well over half a century until 2021, when a strange man who collects old cameras would see it in an antique shop while killing time waiting for an appointment, and develop it because he has an interest in unearthing images of people from unexposed rolls of film when he finds them. Or that her image, captured in a now-distant past of 78s and Bakelite and rationing, would only see the light of day again as a barely recognisable, ghostly monochrome blur in the day-glo plastic image-saturated age of TikTok, self-driving cars, and commercial space travel. Or that she would have the most fleeting, insubstantial connection with another human being who knows nothing about her and may not even have been alive when she was. There is a story there, and potent symbolism too, but I'm sure better minds than mine have already explored that melancholy terrain...

5

'[H]e felt the curious omniscience gained in looking at old photographs where the posing faces and the old-fashioned clothes and the moment itself seem ridiculous ... and unaware of the period quality which is truly there, and the subsequent revelation of waste and failure. ' (Delmore Schwartz) ***

Jonathan Rossney Website: https://jonathan-rossney.format.com IG: @jonathanrossney