Imagined Landscape

When I look at the photograph it seems as though the image has been made from two different times. There is a past at the bottom of the frame where the guards stand staring blankly into the camera. The group standing beside them is set against the image of a woman who appears in one frame and is hidden in the others. The guards and the frames are so still and motionless that it is only the wind moving through the flags that gives the image any sense of life.

At the top of the image, however, another time is unfolding: an image resembling a negative that has not yet been turned into a positive. Perhaps a wind has come and blown the photographer’s dark cloth; or perhaps the photographer drew the dark cloth and after developing the photograph saw this displacement and thought the image had been damaged. Whatever the case may be, day has turned into night, and white luminous mountains have appeared. The mountains in this photograph are mountains made of photography; they are the illusion of a landscape not the landscape itself. A photograph that perhaps never found its viewer in the past but which, thanks to this very imperfection, makes imagination possible today: The imagining of beautiful mountains that never existed.