Short Extract from Push Process

My new novella from Ortac Press, Push Process, is about a photographer in Venice, and is built around a series of short essays on 'his' images. Here's one:

At the bar in an overpriced café. The waiter knows I’m not going to tip him, but he keeps his contempt to himself. Behind me, way back over my right shoulder, framed by curtains, there’s a plate-glass window, which looks onto a colonnade. Because it’s dark outside, a projection of the waiter’s face bounces back off the plate glass into the café interior. All that’s reflected in the mirror behind the bar.

People walking past the window on the street outside always glance in. It’s a reflex; they can’t help it. So if I set the focal point of my lens ‘inside’ the mirror, I can capture someone looking through the glass, from outside the café, at the exact moment they pass the outline of the waiter, projected onto the window from inside the café. A reflection, next to the reflection of a reflection. 

Since I’m left-handed, when I look through the viewfinder, it covers my left eye. I have to press the camera body in tight against my glasses and the bridge of my nose; and then I have to pull it away to flip the film lever forward. Before I release the shutter, I hold my breath, because when the air leaves my lungs, my hands will shake. So each exposure is a single breath, contained, and that makes it a single perception, discrete, with a duration – in this case, one-sixtieth of a second. The slowest I can risk, given the person outside will be in motion. 

This image is a hypothesis in my head before it’s an experiment, and it’s a singular experiment, unrepeatable. I’ll have to bring the camera up fast and shove it in the waiter’s face, no warning. He’ll put up with that, even without the tip, but I won’t get away with it twice. 

When someone outside is about two seconds away from the right location, before they become visible in the mirror, the sound of their footsteps reaches a particular pitch. That’s my cue. Start moving the camera up to my eye when I hear it, before the image is ready, before it presents itself. 

Click.

One-sixtieth of a second is – just, barely – long enough to distinguish the sound of the shutter opening from the sound of its closing. In that interval, I see nothing, I’m conscious of nothing – except duration itself. 

No one ever asks the next question, the obvious question: How did you keep yourself out of the mirror?