Another Extract From Push Process

Here's another short extract from Push Process, my novel with photographs from Ortac Press:

Arbus said: there’s what you want people to know about you, and what you can’t help people knowing. That’s what a portrait’s about. I say: there’s the thing I want to photograph, and all the things I can’t avoid photographing. I try to see everything in the frame – the grid on the viewfinder, square by square. But it’s impossible. And that’s what the picture’s about. 

This is a seventeen-minute exposure. The car on the right is there for the first eight. The driver changes a baby’s nappy on the hood; he walks over, puts it in the rubbish bin on the left; returns to his car, drives away. All invisible, below the camera’s threshold of attention. 

About the same time the first car leaves, the Mercedes in the middle backs into the frame. The driver gets out and says, Am I spoiling your photograph? Anzi. You’re doing something to it, but you’re definitely not spoiling it. 

All that’s invisible too, and both cars are half there. By which I mean, they’re each there for half the exposure. What the photograph doesn’t register is their direction. Time’s a vector, but it runs both ways. Meets in the middle, and bleeds out both ends. 

A third car in the background. Not visible at all, only a parabolic slash through the gates, which open electronically for a minute, then hum shut. 

All these things exist in the gap that opens up between the camera’s attention and my perception. It’s always there, that gap. What photography’s for: to explore it, to articulate it as precisely as possible. The longer the exposure lasts, the wider it grows.