Issue 15: Burning Photographs and Persistent Landscapes

Commentary

The burning Photograph

In the beginning was the photograph.

It lies flat on a silver plate, resting there as if awaiting some quiet ritual. As we listen to the narrator, smoke begins to rise from beneath the image, soon turning to flame. Fire spreads across the paper, consuming its surface without haste, leaving nothing but the scorched paper, erasing the image into oblivion.

This is the opening scene of Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia (1971), a short film in which a photograph burns while a voice — not Frampton’s, but the artist Michael Snow’s — narrates a memory. Each photograph, we learn, is shown only after its corresponding story has already been told, creating a temporal dislocation between image and word. The result is a meditation on time, memory, and loss — slow, methodical, and oddly hypnotic.

I recently interviewed Zackery Hobler, a photographer whose book Beneath Two Skies includes an image of a visibly burned photograph — a rupture, a physical trace that interrupts the flow of memory. I mention it here as a note of curious alignment. The conversation will appear in the next issue.

The gesture is symbolic. The fire, theatrical. We are not necessarily letting go. We are staging the action of letting go — rehearsing impermanence within the permanence of its record. What else could it be, in an era of infinite reproducibility? You can't burn the negative and call it final — unless it’s truly unique and no print exists. You can’t even burn the file, not if it’s backed up, cached, or copied. So when we burn a photograph today — and film it — it’s not an act of destruction. It’s a performance.

Frampton’s Nostalgia makes this plain. The images are destroyed as the film unfolds, yet they’re also preserved, forever loopable, repeatable, watchable. This is no act of loss, but of authorship: a chosen frame, a chosen flame. A conceptual decision.

My reflections so far have been shaped by the film itself. But in the Granta article to which I’m responding, Juliette Jacques takes a different path. The film becomes a springboard for self-expression — and the hook of Frampton’s work is slowly overridden by a personal narrative. In the article, this shift happens quickly. What begins as a compelling engagement with the film soon veers toward autobiography — rejection letters, memory loss, gender transition, cultural history, and back again. The balance tips: Frampton’s work becomes less the subject than the pretext, a surface skimmed before diving into a personal account.

Juliette draws a distinction between two modes — one she calls structural, the other confessional. The first relies on form, on detachment, on the architecture of the work. The second opens inward, building intimacy through vulnerability. It’s an interesting dichotomy worth our attention, but one that raises a fair question: how much of ourselves should we bring into what we create? How much is insight — and how much is confession?

Federico Fellini once said: “All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” The quote affirms that self-expression is not inherently indulgent, but a natural outcome of creation. At the same time, it helps draw a line — between organic self-revelation as a portal, and opportunistic self-centering, as in commanding a topic for unrelated personal analysis.

The burning bush in the biblical story was a vessel for the divine: fire without destruction, a presence that spoke without consuming.

The burning photograph, as we encounter it in Nostalgia, offers something more ambiguous. Watching those pictures burn — faces dissolving, details curling into blackness — is an eerie experience. The voice describes one image while we witness the disappearance of another. It feels like a dissociation exercise: we are invited to imagine one thing while watching something else disappear. Loss is staged, contained, made observable. And strangely, it lingers.

If the burning bush is the voice of God, the burning photograph is the silence between His words.