Inspired Sentence #2

My own re-photography project was a matter of simply being open to what a place could communicate to a person – standing in what was often a place that felt very far away, looking around to experience the panorama through my own experience, as if I were in that box of wood on a tripod, as if I were, to use the nineteenth-century photography term, a sensitive plate.

I love this sentence. It’s from Robert Sullivan’s wonderful Double Exposure (2024), in which he explores the work of the great nineteenth-century photographer Timothy O’Sullivan. Sullivan so closely identifies with his subject that his writing enacts O’Sullivan’s art. Here’s another sample, this from the book’s brilliant Chapter 8 (“Salt Lake Desert, 1869”):

As the light shifted, I felt as if I was on the wet plate of a photographer, my own self, and by experiencing the light and the mist and the lake itself, I was being exposed, as if what was precious and destructive in me, my silver and guncotton, was being touched and changed, as if the world was moving into me while something inside me escaped. 

Sullivan imagines himself as O’Sullivan’s wet-plate camera. It’s an inspired perspective, providing remarkable insight into both O’Sullivan’s art and Sullivan’s deeply personal experience of it.