On a Scale of Me To You

Looking through a box of my stepmother's photographs, I came across these two stunners. I've kept the size of the images as small as possible here to replicate the small print sizes (they were about 2 1/4" square). What struck me right away was the apparent incongruity between the print size and the subject matter. The subjects of these photographs beg to be larger so that they may be inspected closer. Their subject matter is so wonderful, so strange, that it occurred to me that the print size seems to work against their potential to amaze the viewer. Containing these fantastic vistas within tiny borders seems to normalize them. Indeed, where I infer a science fiction scenario I find mundanity instead. The other-wordly structures do not menace the pedestrians as I might expect. They exist calmly in the background; the people walk normally and do not run from them. It is as if they are not even there, as if their difference has been entirely effaced. The things from another world have become things of this world, so much so that they need not be acknowledged. This is slightly discomforting, and suddenly I realize that these people are in fact unable to see the structures, that somehow the camera that captured them was able to see the unseen. It is indeed a science fiction scenario: an invasion is imminent, and will commence when all of the alien troops are in position. What a privilege it is to look at the world through this magical camera.

Last night I was channel-surfing and I landed on one that replayed so-called "classic" wrestling matches from the past. I think TV wrestling is idiotic, and yet when I come across it I usually watch it with my jaw dropped for a couple of minutes - the level of spectacle can be so fixating. The "classic" match I came across last night was additionally engrossing because for some reason the singer Cyndi Lauper was the manager of one of the female wrestlers. What?!
(Oh right, by the way, this match was of female wrestlers, but no less idiotic). Strange cultural and spectacular wires were crossing. Anyway, despite trying to catch a glimpse of Ms. Lauper shouting ringside ("Get up, Wendi!"), I became distracted by a guy about seven or eight rows back from the ring constantly taking photographs with a long, thin camera, which I assumed to contain 110 film. If you don't know about these cameras, they were miniature with very poor lenses and terrible exposure control. The negative for one photo was about the size of a fingernail. These technical features meant that the photos had very low resolution and crappy focus. They were kind of contradictory as well, because while they were considered "miniature" they still need to be fairly long in order to hold a film cartridge. The guy I watched kept firing off exposures, shooting horizontally, then vertically, then horizontally again, and all the while a practically invisible flash was going off, no doubt illuminating at most a few inches in front of him.

Why was this guy taking so many photographs from such a distance with such a compromised camera? Why was my stepmother (or her husband) taking such small photographs (or at least having them printed very small) of such massive structures? I think in both cases the act of taking the photograph means more than "taking the object." Of course there is the motivation of acquiring memorabilia. That there will be a record of "having been there" is self-evident. But there is also the act of looking that cameras allow us to experience. Regardless of using a smaller gauge to capture a scale that exceeds it, the ability to capture it is enough to satisfy our corporeal engagement with the world before us. It may seem obvious but it is worth restating that everything in the world is of a scale that escapes containment. The act of photographing involves specific choices that are ultimately bound by position, perspective, ideology, etc. Cameras are important because they remind/enable us to look. It is the act of looking in the present that connects us to the world, whether what we see amazes, confirms, pleases, denies, and so on. In this sense, cellphone cameras continue to make possible this capacity for us to look. They too have terrible resolution and focus, but their very ubiquity enable users to "look" and transmit on a scale that was previously impossible. Photography has allowed us to shift from being impressed by the scale of the referent to being implicated in the scale of consumption. For better or worse.

N.B. Before anyone notifies the proper authorities, I did some research and discovered that the two above photographs were taken at Expo 1958 in Brussels, Belgium. The first photo depicts the Atomium exhibit, and the second shows the Pavilion of Great Britain. Kind of brings it down to Earth, doesn't it?