Mill River Installation

Sunday, July 17, 2011

These images are from my Mill River Installations I and III, made in November, 2005, and July, 2006, respectively.

Marguerite, State I

Marguerite, State 2

Marguerite, State 3

Marguerite, State 4

Marguerite in Deep Water, State 1

Marguerite in Deep Water, State 2

Marguerite in Deep Water, State 3

Marguerite and Tom at The Gates, NYC

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Mill River Installations, Haydenville, Massachusetts

November 2005 – July 2006

I printed my first rock in October 2005.

“Come on,” she whispers. As she begins to lose hope—she should know how long it takes, but she’s impatient—a dark diagonal streak emerges, hazy but evident, in the amber glow of the darkroom. She bends closer, breathing in the not-strictly-unpleasant, fresh-urine scent of nearby stop bath. Her eyes plead with a drenched rock sitting in a tray of developing solution, its surface a mystery of grey shapes.

A half-second later the shapes resolve, unmistakably now, into a miniature topography of her face. In the half-light she can see the image clearly. When the rock was dry it was pale reddish, like a brick. But now that it’s slick her features burn vivid ochre, fanned in brown shades that recede to deep black.

Five long minutes later she plucks the rock out of its bath and ducks outside. In daylight her heart sinks. Her self-portrait had been sharp in the darkroom; she’d even been able to pick out strands of hair, like fine rake-marks, against the dark mass of her head. Out here the grains and crevices of the rock assert themselves again, taking revenge on her face. It never ceases to amaze her that illumination doesn’t reveal more of the image; it only reveals more of everything.

As she reminds herself that this merger is what she’s seeking—animate and opposite, woman and rock—the rock pitches with vertigo. Parts of the image sink down, no surer than a memory, while others float up from the ancient seas inside to surface, fully seen. It’s a delicate balance between the chunk of planet she’s got in her hand and the thin veneer of herself, a slight stain of humanity, printed on top.

I wrote that imagined account of what it might be like to print a photograph on stone a few months before I actually did it. As it turned out, my experience was eerily similar to my character’s. I was elated at first, heart racing—it was magic, like witnessing an interior fossil float to the surface—but I used the wrong solution, and the first image I printed disappeared when I tried to fix it. Heartbreak. I wrote, “Image a short-lived secret I’ll never share, seen only in darkness.”

My darkroom journal for Fall 2005 is filled with hypotheses, corrections, failures, and finally successes. On 2 November 2005 I realized the petrographs needed to go back where they came from.

For these first rocks that meant the fast-running Mill River in Northwest Massachusetts. My initial two installations there proved unsatisfactory. On the third try, in July 2006, I assembled a small weir of petrographs not far from where the river had been dammed. They remained in the water for four days, continually dislodged and resettled by currents; transformed by sun, shade, and the surface patterns made by wind and rain; and progressively eroded by water softening, infiltrating, and bubbling up beneath the photo emulsion.

When I returned to collect the petrographs on the fourth day I found that most of them had disappeared. I was upset at first, but decided that the “erosive effects” of any installation include pilfering.

As I hunted for remaining rocks I saw a woman and three small children in a swimming hole beneath the dam. The woman came over, wanting to know if I’d put the pictures on the stones. I said yes and she went to get her four year-old daughter, who’d earlier told her this was the best day ever.

“Look,” said the little girl with grave delight, indicating one of the battered petrographs. “Today the rocks have faces.”