In 2000, Issue 162 of Aperture Magazine contained my brief introduction to a group of New York-based visually impaired photographers; the interviews were conducted when I was then an Assistant Editor at Aperture and was working on the accompanying book, entitled "Shooting Blind." Some images never entered the book.
At the time, one of the photographers, a woman in her eighties, who died a year later, asked me if I would model nude for her. I couldn't turn down her request because her enthusiasm for nudity was old-fashioned and innocent and because she was my elder. But the photo could not be included in the book that I was editing and she was in. That was our agreement. I went to her apartment in Upper Manhattan and we took the images with the help of her assistant. The lights were dark and she used a flashlight to illuminate the body, my body. Later, she would have to subject the photos to enormous powers of magnification to see what she had made. I saw the contraption in her bedroom—a beige machine—blowing up letters, mechanically engorging images with volume and light.
Metaphorically, these vestigal images that exist within the body of work but outside of the publication are a strange monstrosity—extra and excommunicated. Although the excised photos are almost eclipsed by what has been disseminated, they still lie in the dark of the editor's head. They reorganize themselves: here is Victorine Floyd-Flood's self-portrait—where her bony, dark-skinned face melts against a smear of dimly lit ancient and flower-patterned wallpaper. There is the image of me, stretched out, thin, white, and naked on a couch. My skin is glowing but the head appears severed from the body; a strip of darkness cuts across the throat.
The book that was not a book.
These imaginary archives and manuscripts that only pose as book aren't unmentionable or unheard of. Marguerite Duras speaks of the night that is a book. Paul Gaugain continuously declares that his publication, "Avec et Apres," will not exist as the object you presume it to be: "This is not a book."
And it charms; that he tells us that what we hold in our hands cannot be. And these images also resist common assumptions of what cannot be—that interior vision wends its way to the surface—erupting in images that may be too baroque or sweet or hungry for our tastes. It can embarrass us—a book that is weird and light-pocked and personalized. Although, I'm glad this book does not align itself with the current 'cool,' I also long for the other book—unsupportable, unpublished.
