YARGH!

In Cinematics, I noticed how the Objet a is the lexis: the socialized unit of reading, of reception; in sculpture, the statue, in music, the piece. Also, of course what kept resonating through the book were the differences between film and photography.. Interestingly enough, certain writers were working in times when video capture devices were cumbersome, limited in quality and also difficult to view.

The street, in the extended sense of the word, is not only the arena of fleeting impressions and chance encounters but a place where the flow of life is bound to assert itself. p82

Utilizing the photographic camera as killing machine, I began to search through my past in order to find an instance where I did capture death in its tracks.

This capture would be best searched for if I were to filter through only my snapshots.

Snapshots: like death, is an instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into another world, into another kind of time-unlike cinema which replaces the object in an unfolding of time similar to life. p126

How many snapshots have I taken throughout my life? Well, since I have had a camera phone, the snapshot has been extremely common. I filter some more, beyond the camera phone, searching for the lexis as physical gel and paper with markings, where an image is burned onto light sensitive emulsion.

To filter even further, I looked for a snapshot that had a punctum

Barthes: The only part of a photograph which entails the feeling of an off-frame space is the punctum: the point of sudden and strong emotion, of small trauma; it can only be a tiny detail. The punctum depends on the reader.

So my Emage (a charged image), this objet a is a snapshot I took as I was leaving my high school with some friends in my 1971 VW Bus. My sister had just given me a cheapo 35mm camera to experiment with. As I was turning the corner, we saw this couple on the sidewalk. For some reason, we were trying to scare people that day by screaming at them as loudly and violently as we could, following along with a “click” of the camera. What a great use of these machines; the voice box, the German van, the camera. The scream was pronounced “YAAARGH!”

Once I managed to develop the film (with my allowance), my friends and I rejoiced in the long study of this image. Every time we looked at it, something new showed itself: the woman’s hand reaching for the fence, the couple’s intense grip, the man’s defensive stance. I began to look at the sidewalk, the provisional repair.

There is something missing though, and this is special, this is the lack, the missing corner of the photograph. My mother’s dog ate the corner and I chose at the time to snip it off rather than repair it. I will never have that data. Whenever I see this image, I investigate the edge, top right, and extend out the image to fill that gap, to complete the photo.

When I see this photo now, I see death’s presence. The dog that chewed the photo is dead. Also, this place, Hialeah, is no longer my home. The clothing that was worn in 1996 is dead, my van is gone, friends gone, but I do remember the speed in which we ran past these folks, the sound of the motor, and the smell of rubber and asphalt that accompanied the street. The YARGH photo survives as a fetish object (now digitized).

“The photograph, inexhaustible reserve of strength and anxiety, shares, as we see, many properties of the fetish (as object) if not directly of fetishism as activity.”p130