Lot awaiting development, off of Interstate Avenue in Portland, Oregon, 2006
A photograph of geology records the activities of the seemingly static, suggesting the direction a future might take based on remnants of a past. It was noted by Manuel De Landa that, as mammals, we are part of a prehistory of the mineralisation of the world; our cities with their first rock walls expressing the making-mineral of our species. Human biological time is a short intensity of force upon the earth; geological time an enduring and enveloping clause of planetary force majeure. We are remnants of the mineral, to which we will return. The camera, whether iPhone or Hasselblad is a sophisticated mineralisation producing the illusion of an image, whether fixed by light on silver or platinum or by the placement of carbon or ink deposited on paper or pixels on screen. The time it takes to capture an image, say of an ancient city onto a sensor, is but an infinitesimal moment within the time it took for the concatenation of forces to produce the human and earthly conditions of its possibility. The ancient city loses its mass to become a perspective, an ephemeral transparency. There is a dignity and pathos in this modest encounter. Face-to-face with the scene we are to capture, we are instead captured, enraptured by the time on display of our seemingly infinite other. We are but a slice and remnant of this time. Of our photograph it can be said that it is a remnant of a remnant, a partial mineralisation of what we will become.
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