spent two hours looking for a photograph I already used
tore the whole flat file apart looking for a photo of my grandmother's kitchen. the one with the bad linoleum and the pressure cooker in the corner. I was sure I had it, I could see it in my head.
found it in the piece from 2021. I'd already cut it up and glued it down. didn't even recognize my own work as my own source.
so now I'm sitting here with a half finished thing on the table and a stack of paper I just spent two hours unfolding for nothing. and the annoying part is the piece looks better with the photo in it than it would have with a fresh copy. can't make a copy anyway, it's a physical print, one of maybe three.
I keep buying more found photos online and none of them have the right weight. too crisp. people posed. my family's photos are all slightly out of focus because nobody could hold still.
anyway. back to unfolding.
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This is the part of working in layers nobody warns you about. You stop being able to see your own archive because it has become the surface. I have done the same thing with wax, gone looking for a passage of colour I remembered, only to find I had already buried it three layers down and scraped it half away.
The detail that interests me is that the piece looks better with the cut photo than a clean copy would. I think that is not an accident. A fresh copy sits on top of the work. The one you already glued has been through your hands, absorbed some of the surface and some of the time. You cannot fake that. So the two hours were not for nothing, they were the price of finding out the source was already spent. Naja. Half the job is learning to let the buried version be the version.