an object · in the study cupboard
A folding plate camera, c. 1922, brass and walnut. The bellows are sound; the shutter, when wound, still releases with a small dry click. The plates it was built for have not been manufactured for sixty years.
It is kept in the study cupboard on the second floor, in its leather case, beside an unrelated tin of pencil shavings. The keeper takes it out twice a year, opens it, holds it to the light, and puts it away again — a small ceremony with no photograph at the end of it.
The noemic position is that the camera does not need to take a photograph in order to be a camera. The aperture exists. The aperture is the work.
field note · the scanner-obscura series of noemata is, at heart, a meditation on this — the photograph is what happens when light, time and a hole in a box are arranged in a certain way; the rest is convention.