For a long time now, I’ve been going through all of the photos that Danielle took while on her travels in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan. I’ve collected them all through various prints, negatives, and slides, scanning and compiling them all for a photography book of her work for the future. In going through the negatives, and scanning them directly, I came across this image, which I hadn’t seen anywhere until that point. Most of the images were printed, and collected in several large photo albums, but not this particular frame.
I realized, since the photo is not clear-cut, and it does contain some defects and errors, as wel as bleeding onto other frames, that despite its beauty, possibly when the film was developed it was skipped over, and not printed. Personally, this is a common problem, and when revisiting negatives sometimes I find some of my best photos in the vaults of the negatives that photo labs had skipped over. It occurred to me that its very probable that Danielle never actually was able to see the results from this photo, taken somewhere unnamed on her travels, but only when she originally took the photo on that glowing evening.
In searching for the proper artwork for our album ‘Generic City’, the circumstances and preservation of this photograph seemed absolutely perfect to me, and in many ways its preservation though featuring it as our artwork made it even more special. It’s likely I won’t ever be able to find out where exactly this photo was taken, but in the end I think its vagueness and beauty transcends the need to be defined, letting it exist simply as it is.