Kinder assembled on the bank they’re snapping photos of the dunk, staging the scene for posterity’s too obvious — within the frame of their ready youth, their rummaged souls, there’s a memory in the making and a history, also, they’ll admit: the fleeting innocence of such revelation…a sign gets tacked onto a tree at the back, lightninged to fall to the Miss, a bridge to tomorrow and its hopeful conviction; the poster there indicating in attractive lettering, Wanted Dead, Westernly sherrifed with serif…that here’s an Officially Recommended opportunity for a photograph, what’re you waiting for? and soon, flashes pop off everywhere, lenses loom, apertures widen to the horizon, the glaregolden set of the sun; despite the darkening, the f. stops keep going, keep flowing, the gaping mouth of the delta all down to the Gulf ’s flooding with collodion, gun cotton dissolved in ether, that is…the exposure’s nearly half a minute, a minute, more, longer, always longer: one meaningless motionless moment frozen as solid and as flat as the river just a lame handful of strokes north upstream; and in that time, not even an eye may twitch nor a lid shy shut (a traveling photographer, who maintains offices on the leftbank of last century, hustles into his darktent, to unpack his grip and arrange the trays of his developing outfit, his bellows, cranks, and reels): the plates have to be developed immediately, there’s no time to lose, never is, must be kept wet under syrups, thickened tears, honey dissolved in water, must be sensitized in a bath of silver nitrate spread on a plate of glass, or in cellulose nitrate, this substance more flammable than the paper it’s to be smeared on, the product printed, the image forbidden to even itself — and that’s why it can be developed, its reversal, that’s why it’s facing out…this is all process, understand, with the assembled — us — invited to select their medium, ours; how any souvenir can be developed any way you like, in almost too many ways: in an emulsion of gelatin silver, or with the technique it replaced, albumen, which is eggishly eyewhite, given generational hatch — whatever their nostalgia requires, we’re here to serve, whatever you want or your memory needs, we provide. A life macerated in magnesium, or developed in a dish of heated mercury, amid the vaporous essence of iodine, the balm of bromide from stenchy, unquenchable bromine, sodium thiosulfate, a host of other names none can ever know to pronounce, to concoct chemically in the lab of the mouth…this and more’s explained to these lost revivalist, whiteshrouded kinder lining as if in timeline the banks of the river — the pose, the technological prosaics of wonder; the photomechanical processes that make the widespread dissemination of images possible’s what: Do You Know This Mensch? all over the Sabbath pre-prints, in bulletins and circulars, at the postoffice, and waiting on line; an image strained through a fine screen, dispersed into dots, newspaper raster, each schmeck of Him every dark and darkening pore holding the secret entire, exploded hugely across the fold, a spread, a schmear campaigned to claim uneasy truce with flaw; etched then inked to the page, gravured…intagliod in halftone, in duotone: yes or no, it asks, the binary cleave, life or death, who wants to know; or maybe you’d prefer to know Him in solarization, that inversion of tones resulting from an image being exposed again, reexposed, to light during development — whichever, your wish is ours and, anyway, I’ll shoot straight with you, it doesn’t matter: as whatever the presentation, production, or reproduction by which we destroy, there’s always wear, inevitably tear, everything in the end goes to molder in sepia, or gray, which is the murder of black by white — memory’s tone, the past fading In.
