I've been living with them for weeks now, scattered like wind nlown seeds around the bus, memories surfacing at first of the images, then of the printing, of times I pve though of them, there are here in the real world,not locked away behind glass somewhere, they do not scroll away, they are here, now, with us, about . It's finny then that we call these instant, they take far more time to come into the world than the digital scenes immediately chimpable under glass. 

They are not particularly good prints as such things are judged from a technical standpoint, and yet they are in some way some immediate and micaculous. This technology is like something out the future and that we are not utterly amazed by it says far more about us than it does about the quality of the prints. 

The immedicy is why. 

The real, the artifact. What does it mean to have the artifacts? The ability to share with others, to take a portrait is far less introsive when you can share the results immideate. I do not have a fuji camera so it takes considerably more effort ofr me, but I've seen several Fuji photographers go on at length about what a game changer this was to be able to immediately hand an artifact to a subject, or even to return the next day with a gift. 

In an age when photography has a sinsier undercurrent about it -- cameras in use! shoplifters will be perscuted! facial recognition -- the instant print reminds us the camera can, and should, be a thing of joy, a thing of sharing, connecting and a bridge between rather than the all-seeing eye that big brother in all its forms seeks to twist it into. 

The little rectagles are smaller than the full size polarouds of my childhood, but they are somehow more powerful for it, as if these are new growth, the old growth has been clear cut away, a loss yes, but look what remains, look wt we still have, look what can still be enjoyed. Thes tiny artifacts have been to put up like seeds taking root. There were siveral tucked in the molding aa cabinent this morning. Tomhgith I found one tucked beneath the wall mounted face in my daughters' room, another leaning against the bookshel and a third wedged in the clasping weave of a bamboo basket. We print, they scatter and take root in our world. The colors are all wrong, the blies too dark, the light tones washed out, the shadows less vibrant than the should be. And no cares, not ne loosk at these and things wow, that black doesn't go to 250.

They have their own frame, setting them off from the world, a little whie border, a way of becoming their own thing perhaps. Little squares and rectables of color popping up everywhere I run. And the more I ove with them the more IO love them. I buy some twine and tiny clothes pins, the one and only time I ave set foot in the crafting isle at Walmart. I want then to have room to grow, places to live, little exibits that subtly keep the past alive all around us. 

It could be argued that perhaps we should keep the past alive only in hour heads, or more in our heads, in our memories and we do. I have know people who displike photographs a famous climber pasked Gelen Rowell not to photograph his climbs because the photo interfered with his meory of the event. ButI don't know, it does not have the affet for me, I think of these events more when I see the phiti, I feel in the detaisl that phoio failed to capture, the minutes befoe and faster the shugger flicked up for that fraction of a second to capture whatever it is that if captured. All those meoment that come bfore and ater come with the phitigraph, it's stack of time not singular moment. Ilike what it is fir the viewer, for the photographer and subject a photoigraph is a stack of time, not a single moment, what happened juest befoer the sutter opened, what happened just after, it is all there in memory and singlyuar images, the moment draw out, calls up all the rest as well. It's a movie of the moments in the mind. perhaps this why I can not particular drawn to video, perhaps this is why the instax has some power because it keeps that movie in the mind, it doesn't share it, it is a private moment.

This may be why photographs do not ruin my memories, but movies do, the feel artifical this need to record, I like to record with my head, memorie becomes my vide I use photographs to categolue and organize it.