For People who Love Photography

Tengo que decir que de todos los libros que han caido en mis manos en lo que va de año, acabo de sacar el mejor hasta ahora, "Sixty Lights".

Sixty Lights by Gail Jones

No voy a comentar sobre el libro in extensu, pues fuera un placer que las personas que gustan de la fotografia tuvieran la oportunidad de leerlo, y asi no le quito su misterio.

Como introduccion solo los dejo con la nocion de que trata sobre captar la realidad con el favor de la fotografia y sobre la idea de que: "a life abbreviated is not a life diminished" (me gusta como suena en ingles). Es la calidad que le damos a nuestra vida y lo que le permitimos a nuestros ojos apreciar y es utilizar el arte de la fotografia para hacer eterno lo que nunca dejara de ser tranistorio. Lo inmortal es asi, cambia, se transforma, nace, muere, es inconstante y visto del prisma pesimista, triste...

Con la fotografia abreviamos las secuencias de nuestras vidas y aumentamos nuestro inexplicable deseo para seguir viviendo.

Les adelanto tambien algunas frasesillas, con la inmensa pena de no poder ponerlas todas:

- Photo-graph : light writing. There has never been a time without the photograph, without the residue and writing of light.

- Thomas pointed out that there were lovers shining mirrors at each other, one on the dock and one not far from them on the deck. It was the woman who was leaving. She tilted her oval mirror to catch at the sun and a young man, diminishing, answered from the shore. Lucy was transfixed. This was what she wanted, a photosensitive departure. Light trained by glass to locate and discover a face, a beam to travel on, a homing device, a sleek corridor through the infinity of sky itself.

- (cuanto me he identificado con esta) Unable to reason her profounf sense of discrepancy in the world, discrepancy between bodies and words, between the niggardly specificity of things, often tiny, inconsequential, mundane things and the cloudy abstractions they brought in their wake, she decided she would know the world by its imagistic revelations. Seen this way, London presented a venerable randomness, by which, eventually, Lucy was won over.

- Perhaps it is the opacity, not the transparency, of other that one finds compelling. Beyond the face is a funnel to hidden selves, intact qualities one doesnt expect, the mysteries secreted in dim and blessed moments, the store of memories, unbeheld, that only a single person knows. Scraps of sure self. Fragments of undeveloped character. Wounds. Recoveries. Innermost otherness.

- (para Naty, pues se como le gusta Elizabeth Barrett Browning)It is not merely the likeness which is precious... but the association, and the sense of nearness involved in the thing... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed for ever!

- What accidental pattern of life delivers us our friends? What, our lovers? Might there be a plot within biographies arranged entirely by affections?

- The word was bioluminescence. There was in every living thing this elusive capacity. In lovers. In the newborn. In the congregation at a temple. In the man who was killed by a mirror and lay on his back looking at death. Every person was a lighthouse, a signal of presence. This was nothing sentimental: it was the single, wise thing that she utterly knew.