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The Photographs of Photographers
F.X. MacKenzie The photographs of photographers are ungodly sights: scowls or blank looks, raccoons in headlights-- post-office portraits even when we "look nice." There is a reason we like to stay on the other end of that clinical, cynical, unblinking lens, that mirror for monkeys (frank as harsh noonlight, unflattering as an ex-wife). We squirm, tortured on the tenterhooks of pompous posterity. Historians should have no historical significance. We protest, arms flung up like crucifixes to ward off the evil lens-eye. We who capture the souls of natives and the blur of butterfly wings live in mortal fear of being pinned down to the drying board of 1/125th second's humanness… one immortal exhibit of evidence that we did anything more than watch. © Copyright 2003, 2004 by F.X. MacKenzie |