Photographs

Proof Sheets: 36 Prints These photographs are the index of an hour, memory clocked along negative margins: one through twelve, one through twelve, one through twelve. Even in a sequence there is choice, as when I chose not to photograph silences between words— choice of the parted lips— or choose now a sequence out of time. Scissors: chopped time. Rearrangement is good: You are characters in a drama called then. You are figures for mythology. I shall make Phaedra blonde, Theseus dark, Hippolytus blonde— blue eyes: blue eyes; that will do— Antigone singing in the graveyard wind, a twelve-year old who is Jocasta alternate weeks. Neither imagination nor my willing flesh can move this hand one fraction of an inch; a shift of stance could have juxtaposed mouths. The fixed frame is the drama: Hippolytus at banquet; Phaedra in her chamber, behind her that painting blurred into an omen, as if Theseus were Creon, Meleager, shepherd, faun; Oedipus barefoot, hairskin beast; Antigone maenad, Helen, Artemis. Only out-of-focus figures move.