Cameras are clocks for seeing

Overview

Drawing on Roland Barthes, Cameras are clocks for seeing incorporates text fragments from Barthes as stanzas interspersed into personal meditations on landscape photographs taken by my beloved as a teenager. As a curator of Good Symptom (3rd Thing Press, 2023), a serial publication of time-based literature, I have been spending a lot of time with Barthes’s Camera Lucida, the source material for the title of the publication. During this time, I discovered these photographs in my husband’s childhood dresser and was inspired to meditate on how Seattle (the city where we met) and the time that we have spent there (together and apart) has shaped how we experience place, identity, and our relationship.