Plunging Through Infinitudes of Time

Sometime during the mid-sixties, preoccupied perhaps, I inadvertently started to take pictures over the previous day's captures. Rather than stop, I... more

by Terrance DePietro

Title

Plunging Through Infinitudes of Time

Artist

Terrance DePietro

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

Sometime during the mid-sixties, preoccupied perhaps, I inadvertently started to take pictures over the previous day's captures. Rather than stop, I took myself to the creek where I found plenty of frolicking young gents sporting at the swimming hole. When summer ended and my captures were developed I could only laugh at what materialized. But now I must say the laughter is more an amazement.

Even if I miss the photographic process, its formalities, its quirks, its grain; I do not miss the one small flaw that occurred, never so often, but when it did, it tested my tolerance.

Anyone that gets familiar with their equipment knows the feeling, as you cock the shutter advancing a next frame to be exposed. The drag against the thumb, almost seeing, in mind's eye, the film skirt from the Kodak cartridge, pass the curtains; ratcheting onto the blank reel, one at a time. A thumb as well could feel when the roll was exhausted or coming to end; but there was as well the unmistakable feeling that the spoke wheel of the reel had lost hold of the film! Out-and-about, it could bring a halt to everything, if improvising failed to marry the two.

For the novice I remind that the film was completely sensitive to light; which meant total darkest was needed to open the camera and realign the film to the spokes. Or wait until the darkroom; which often was out of the question! We all took adequate measures in these rare cases; seems back then our self-reliance was tested more frequently; in reality we were accustomed to work in the dark and often could overcome the delay. But it still was a sour note; not one iota of pleasure for this fellow!

That being the case, I might have been put in such a spot back then, I have no recollection; but somehow I was aware that I might well be shooting over an exposed portion of the roll - and no way to tell what, or whether, anything would align. Was I merely in the hands of 'chance' or was I moving on an intuition of sorts?

Given our relationship with intuition, I imagine most would leave it to a chance; I as well would have gambling on a chance back then. But funny thing about intuition, it follows from its own idea of time, and flows what seems to be in-and-out of our ideas of time. It seems it has other ideas about what can be thought about this abstraction we call reality.

Time and Intuition are high on my hit-parade these days. And when I found this last trove of negatives from my early years I was actually shocked to find these few surreal images - I had no recollection that I was drawn so; thinking I was pragmatically captivated to depiction and nothing else.

In truth they are most appropriate to my explorations because they stand my memories on their head! Lately making it more important to think in terms of memoir rather than memory - where memory is a shallow singular instance; and memoir, as I use it, is an entire collection of events that transpire, most simultaneously, within the 'neighborhood' of the instance but to all other possibilities that actually occurred in that former time - appropriate to the extent that I even published a book of images and an article in May 2019 to that effect.


For anyone wishing to enjoy a pdf and willing to copy the address it rests below; and feel free to share it:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lHOKdBtEeLDeqdE10oUTZ22E3JGNEWFm/view?usp=sharing

So what am I getting at in the image itself?

Well to me I find it most interesting that the lad is diving, headfirst, into the murk and mire of time; where time is analogous to the multitudes of individual 'durations' (each a period of time) that constitute a lifetime of durations to be gazed into. We have only 'faith' to splash into such a fluid arrangement; and a mentality that still wonders time; it limits; its apparatus; its possibilities...That leaves us in states of wonder that intuition saves us from; leading us to mind and time - one duration at a time!
Something like that!

What is more important is the viewer's thoughts so feel free to ramble!
tdp - 22may19

Uploaded

May 22nd, 2019