Bill Morrison

Bill Morrison began as a film abstractionist in the tradition of Stan Brakhage. His material was pre-shot footage, not particularly old, which he would distress chemically and then cut together into a new movie. By imposing a screen of corruption over the image, he added a layer of self-consciousness to the illusion of film: in much the same way that a certain kind of painter might play representation against its means, Morrison’s purpose was to create an awareness of the physicality of photographic film while preserving the purely optical trick of cinema. In the early 1990s he switched to archival nitrate footage that was already in various states of chemical decomposition. Instead of being merely disfigured, the film he used was now disintegrating with age. At this point, simply because his material was different in this one crucial respect, the effect he achieved deepened abruptly. The passage of time, historical continuity and rupture, memory and its loss, the irrecoverable and irreversible, dissolution and death had not been suggested in Morrison’s filmmaking before. Snapshot collectors may recognize themselves in an artist like Bill Morrison. Decasia, for example, is a series of found snippets, each of which is very much like a found photo; each is a wonderful accident in just the same sense. The age factor in Morrison’s mature style seems familiar, too. Like deteriorating archival film, most of the snapshots we care about are both objects that are physically old and depictions of things that existed long ago, and often they look their age: the two ways of being old seem to be in rough alignment, or one suggests the other. If we are inclined to notice it, the poignance of age is even more dreadful in snapshots than in other found photographic material—including the kind Morrison uses—because more has been lost. The snapshots we collect had utterly private meaning for people who are dead and very likely for an entire lineage that has ended; we know we can’t begin to feel the pictures the way they were once felt. But the truth is that, with the rarest of exceptions, snapshot collectors don’t really care about age in radically old pictures the same way Morrison does. Mostly we care about age for its formal effect. We care about age the way Morrison originally cared about deliberate damage: we are interested in the gap that age opens up between what is represented and the medium of representation, between the subject and the physical photo. The class of photos with an aesthetically pleasing layer of age is just part of a much larger class of photos we like, the class of photos that have suffered aesthetically pleasing accidents. As we know, accident of one kind or another creates everything of interest in snapshots. If what you like is an intended representation modified by something unintended, you are seeing form first, and your pictures effectively pry what is depicted away from the manner in which it is depicted. In the special case of physical deterioration, that gap is again of interest for purely formal reasons, not usually because it brings out the poignance of the distance, the increasing distance, of the subject on the other side of it. So, although the feeling Bill Morrison catches in old found footage is latent in old found photos, that is not what we think we find in them. Conversely, he might not see the point of most of what we do, at least the way we do it. It might seem to him that we were mixing categories—indiscriminately dissolving, in a sea of cold formalism, pictures that have the feeling he finds in his own materials. Although the age of old snapshots is there to be used, we’re not using it. Of course we’re not, because we’re not using our pictures at all. Most of us simply enjoy them. We find them one at a time and we look at them one at a time; we don’t seriously try to make them do anything, even if they almost do it all by themselves—even if an omniscient observer could see that the mass of them was actually doing it. One of Morrison’s decaying clips, seen in isolation, wouldn’t carry much feeling either. But he puts them together. And the way to bring out the feeling of old snapshots is to arrange them. Just as the individuality of snapshot subjects does not begin to overwhelm the viewer until a presentation effectively compares them, age in snapshots can’t really come across until age itself is somehow made the subject of a display. To generalize: quantity and suitable presentation convey information. And that means effectiveness requires quantity and suitable presentation. I’ve called snapshots a medium, and they are. “Finding” a photo, in the technical sense, is analogous to taking a photo; finding a photo can be as conscious and directed an act as taking a photo can be. Nevertheless, to think of snapshots in a collection in isolation, and in particular to display them in isolation, is effectively to deny that a single sensibility selected them and to deprive them of much of their strength.

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