HORVATLAND - THE THIRD MILLENIUM - PROJECTS - AN EYE AT THE FINGERTIPSGO TO HOME

2006 From a presentation of Eye at the fingertips.

It’s a camera and not quite a camera. But it’s always in my left trouser pocket, except when it falls out accidentally and gets lost under the driver’s seat, until I miss it and panic, as if I had suddenly lost a tooth. But its greatest advantage is that it allows me to undertake the most adventurous trips, in spite of my age and my infirmities. For instance on my breakfast table, where an empty yoghurt pot and a few grapefruit peelings, lit by the morning sun and hazed by a puff of cigarette smoke, may appear on it’s tiny screen as a fantastic landscape. Or on the floor of my living room, when the foot of a lady friend, slightly swollen by the tightness of her high-heeled shoe, becomes a gigantic metaphor of something – though I don’t know of what. With a traditional 24x36 reflex camera I would have never known, simply because I wouldn’t have dreamt of lying flat on the floor and viewing that foot from that angle! Though I have to admit that most of the time I shoot from eye level, as I’ve always done: it’s not so easy to discard a life-long habit. But even those more conventional images turn out to be different, as if the very drawbacks of my not-quite-camera were paradoxically turned into benefits. Inevitably its minute screen, held thirty or forty centimeters from my eyes, furnishes less information than a good reflex viewfinder – and infinitely less when in full sunlight. So every shot becomes a bet, whose outcome only becomes apparent much later, when I can see the image on a larger computer screen. If the bet is lost – which happens more than nine times out of ten – the file will end up in the electronic waste-basket, with no qualms or regrets. But the few surviving ones will seem all the more precious: photographs and not-quite-photographs.