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Apple IOS 6 Maps and Robert Frank Photograph of Hoover Dam (1956)

enxuto — Fri, 11 May 2012 22:18:30 +0000

Personal Mapping and the Cold War

Robert Frank, Hoover Dam, Nevada, 1956

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Degas: The Painting of Modern Life

enxuto — Mon, 23 Apr 2012 14:44:30 +0000

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Lisboa Street Views ’86

enxuto — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 22:11:48 +0000

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I found the included photographs stacked in a narrow junk shop in the Bairro Alto neighborhood of Lisboa, Portugal earlier this year. After some negotiating with the proprietor I secured a lot of 26 photographs for 4€. Several of the photographs were stamped verso in purple ink: Foto Lusarte, Largo do Corpo Santo, 32, Lisboa. The address pointed to a photo lab located just 1 km south from where the photographs were purchased. Had I once been a patron there? I vaguely remember walking the spaces inside the photographs with my parents as a child in Lisboa.

There were other clues to establish provenance. Some prints were dated “Março ’86” in pen on verso. Others were tagged in April and May of the same year. Did the lab still exist? Google offered no positive clues. Like most photofinishing businesses Foto Lusarte had, likely, disappeared long ago and was beyond the reach of the world’s most popular Internet search engine.

Verso

The found photographs document storefronts, cobblestone sidewalks, trashcans, barricades and concrete parking bumpers. Common objects resonate like automatic sculptures animated by the photographer’s eye. All of these documents were most certainly made by the same enigmatic author. Had I made these photographs then forgotten to pick them up from Foto Lusarte? Was I preternaturally gifted; a savant; a Portuguese Atget.

Across several prints are arrows, drawn in pen, that point to objects of unknown significance. Didn’t Walter Benjamin compare Atget’s photographs to scenes of a crime – absent of players but full of evidence? It’s possible that these photographs served as the map for a crime that I don’t recall. The photographs suggest the city as a nuanced habitat of chance experiences. Where is that city now? I couldn’t locate it on Google Maps street view. I will return to the same neighborhood with a square format camera to find the found photographs because the comprehensive vacuity of Google Maps is not enough.

Largo do Corpo Santo, 32, Lisboa

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