Photography is a material process for making images, transforming objects, a staining with light. It has nothing inherently to do with cameras or lenses or film, in the way we think we know them. Rather mist, metal, and now a spectrum of plastic: celluloid, silicon and pixel.

Photography’s image is a captive moment, an alibi to soften the violence of time’s burn. This is photography’s promise, our vision the echo of its plastic original.

An echo is not an object, nor an image, but the failure of any body, of any moment to be captured. A model for thinking the relation between any
‘original’ to its ‘copy’, any sensation to its trace.

The classic is the alibi of the original, its moment now and forever photographic. The burn of what is absent though promised, an emotional
contradiction.

Plastic is the property of a material to be both ever-changing and everlasting. The promise of a permanent moment, the fantasy of an original without copies, the stain of the future.

A burn is not an object, nor an image, but the confusion between a sensation and its trace. An impossible capture, and so not a moment at all.

Photography is the promise of plastic with no burn, another emotional contradiction.

A cataract is not an object, nor an image, but a burn, a condition of photography. Softer than plastic, the end of an echo, the stain of a broken promise.

Aodhan Madden