Fuzzy Borders

I bought an Olympus Pen FT half frame camera second hand a few years ago. I love its mechanical shutter noise - a precise and clearly audible clunk. I'd been interested in the diptych format for some time, inspired by Luke Fowler's 'Two Frame Films' photobook. The two pictures printed side by side on a single piece of photographic paper and divided by a slightly fuzzy black line (a thin strip of unexposed film) hovered somewhere between photography and film. Unless careful notes were taken it was almost impossible to predict which images would end up next to each other. I enjoyed the element of chance in this process. Other risks included the possibility of under or over exposing one of the images. This would directly affect the appearance of the neighbouring picture since an average exposure would be sought by the machine during printing. I was keen to recover a sense of occasion with each exposure, something that is often lost with a digital camera. I wanted to slow down and savour the moment. I wanted to make fewer images, think about them a little more before clicking the shutter.

I am drawn to the marvellous in the everyday. I believe in a kind of unconscious creativity, the kind that results in abandoned sofa sculptures, a bucket of snails, a driftwood shrine or taped-over sign. The act of taking/making a photograph is a second layer of creativity employing the language of time, frame and focus. A photograph is a container, a "parcel of time" to borrow John Szarkowski's brilliant phrase. A half frame photograph contains two parcels, possibly of differing durations. I like to think that the sum of these two images is greater than the parts. Each of the paired images relies on the other for support. Sometimes the pairings are sympathetic. Subjects, colours or shapes, for example, synchronise beautifully. Other pairs generate conflict. Some are complete failures, usually for some technical reason.

There is plenty of room for the happy accident.

'Fuzzy Borders' is a phrase I found in Jane Bennett's wonderful book 'Vibrant Matter', a gift from my brother who lives in New Zealand. I enjoy our Skype discussions and he has shared a lot of great ideas with me. I visited him there in 2018 and took my half frame camera with me.

Bennett's book is full of great writing and illuminating concepts. The chapter on metal was particularly exciting and this is where the phrase "fuzzy borders" appears. She discusses Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the "nomadism" of matter:

Playing on the notion of metal as a conductor of electricity, they say that metal "conducts" (ushers) itself through a series of self-transformations, which is not a sequential movement from one fixed point to another, but a tumbling of continuous variations with fuzzy borders. 

I began to reflect on the nature of the photograph itself. If metals can appear inert but, in fact, contain "energetic currents", can the same be said of photographs? Might the thin black strip that runs vertically down the centre of a pair of half frame images function in a similar way to the cracks and fault lines that are the source of metallic vitality? The presence of the black line (the unexposed film) is the vibrating centre of the composition. It simultaneously separates and joins two images together. It undermines the fixity of both. When held together in this way, both images appear unresolved, alive and in continuous dialogue with one another.

England and New Zealand. Teacher and photographer. The left and right image in a photographic diptych. These are the unresolvable elements, the "tumbling of continuous variations", held for me in creative tension by a series of fuzzy borders. 

Jon Nicholls, 2023