An interview with The Heat Inc.’s Jon Dodd about the power of photography and the eternal light of Rock & Roll.
“What do you love about photography?
For me, it’s always been about the ability to capture a moment in time and space. You listen to Asimov talk about it and he points out that before photography there might as well have been nothing. Nothing and no-one that we could see, at any rate.
I mean sure, you have painting but who had their portrait painted before 1840? Kings, queens, the nobility, maybe a merchant or two but rarely a commoner. It was just too expensive. Too impractical. Plus, painting is a compromise at best. It’s not an accurate depiction of reality, whereas with the advent of photography, we finally had this tool, this incredible ability to make the world stand still.
Polaroid photography is both a wonderful example and an exception because it’s an alchemical process of sorts, one that so beautifully straddles the line between art and science but it was designed and marketed to be available to everyone.
Edwin Land was almost democratic, in a way. Everyone and their grandmother could take a picture and it would be an accurate, albeit painterly depiction of a moment in time. Actually, it’s not only a picture of a time and place and the people and objects therein but it’s also physically, necessarily from that point in time, which makes each and every one of them a special sort of artefact. It’s about making everything stop, just for a second and then being able to look back at that image and get a feeling or a memory by doing so. It’s about extrapolating meaning from the past.”
