Spectral Echoes

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OK - let's get meta. The above image is a quick iPhone snap of a photograph I took in Athens, just below the Acropolis, in 1979. The guy featured was a tourist portrait photographer of a kind that was already a dinosaur: his camera was designed to shoot directly onto photographic paper - aided by the stupendous Greek light. Processing this in the camera box/darkroom would produce a negative image, which was then placed in the fold-down holder seen at the front of the camera, and then re-photographed to produce a positive image, in turn processed in the box/darkroom of the camera and resulting in the finished portrait for sale to the punter when dry.

In the image above, you can also see the reflection of my right hand in the glass of the photo frame in which the original picture has lain since God knows when: the print was made in the darkroom at Mech. Eng., Brum Uni, when I worked there - over forty years ago [blog posts passim]. Layers of observation and history woven digitally from one analogue world into another and out the other side to appear here, a ghost image of a ghost image of ghosts.

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