“This is the story of a man marked by an image of childhood”

Like many photographers and — I imagine — book makers, I’ve been inspired by Chris Marker’s short film “La Jetée.” It’s a film about memory, the future, the past, and catastrophe — made up almost entirely of still photographs. During the Covid-19 pandemic, I started to see discarded masks in the street. They reminded me of what Chris Marker’s time travelers wore on their eyes.

So I decided to make a book based on my memory of “La Jetée,” using the first line of the film as the narrative. But I wouldn't rewatch the film or try to stage it. I wanted to find it where I lived. And I would use a recent instant-photo-book technique I’d come up with.

With this format, Instax Wide photos are taped and glued together back-to-back to make a codex. It’s a kind of book that can be made by anyone, with readily available materials, in just an hour or two. Only the day I went to take these photos I forgot my black-and-white Instax Wide film. I had only a small Olympus XA with long expired Polaroid Polachrome Instant 35mm slide film inside. So I used that instead. After developing the negatives at home I used an old Vivitar Instant Slide Printer, with a bizarre adapter, to expose them onto the Instax Wide film. In the center of the book, I used Instax Mini film instead, creating two split pages.

It may seem like dumb photographic geekery, but to me it was time travel, machines, a way of transferring the defects from one process to another, just as memory magnifies and preservers errors. The split pages at the center are a point of fracture. It’s where our time traveler breaks down. The cover has an unused slide cut into it. While often difficult to see when closed, with a slight source it can be projected.

And it’s not accurate. Not to the narrative. And yet it is.