MUSINGS Da Vinci’s Mona Kodak

Da Vinci’s Mona Kodak


The Circling Fin
Fin Keegan

The recent Kodak bankruptcy reminds us all of the pre-digital world, a remote world of vinyl records and single-channel television.
Tellingly, youngsters who have never stood in a draughty hall to dial a telephone (who have never dialled a telephone come to that) couldn’t really understand the historical importance of the Kodak failure. But, once upon a time, you had to think about what you were photographing because you only had a limited number of exposures and each one cost money to develop. That was a time when Kodak was King.
These days, snapping pics of the kids, I take a dozen at a time, knowing I can quickly delete eleven in favour of the one where they are not looking away or engaged in some childish vice posterity can do without.
But, for all their advantages, modern technology has produced some odd outcomes.
Years ago, before she retreated behind bullet-proof glass, I sat for a while beside the Mona Lisa and watched a steady troop of tourists shuffling past the world’s most famous painting. Only one of these people do I still remember – almost three decades later – and that was precisely because I never saw what he looked like.
I never saw what he looked like because this gentleman entered the room holding a large video-camera in front of his face and never took it down. He entered, stood before Da Vinci’s canvas, and then exited without his own naked eye once experiencing the great lady’s visage. Such behaviour makes me wonder if her famously ambiguous smile, with its undeniable shadow of contempt, is at the expense of those odd bucks, homo touristicus, who have have been gathering before her over the centuries.
Certainly the advent of photography enriched and complicated our relationship with what we see or remember. And certain photographs are now so old that they have become almost as priceless as Da Vincis.
The writer Simon Winchester has a telling story: He recently wrote a book about an image taken by Lewis Carroll of the girl on whom he based the character Alice (of ‘Wonderland’ fame).
After his publisher proposed the idea, Winchester discovered that the original item was kept in New Jersey, less than 50 miles from his house.
But, oddly, he ended up writing the entire book without ever seeing it: Princeton University denied him access, offering instead a high-resolution facsimile. The original was too valuable to be looked at.
Meanwhile we are busily generating images so trivial and multifarious that they are effectively unseeable: Witness the man taking automatic-photos of his surroundings every 90 seconds. He claims, correctly, that this will soon be standard behaviour.
But the problem here is that although such photos purport to be an exhaustive account of an experience, they are in fact only a slice of reality: they will never tell us what that man was thinking or feeling.
Life, as Leonardo da Vinci would quickly tell us, is more than its moments, whether Kodak or otherwise.

Fin Keegan is a writer based in Westport. This column is based on his weekly radio essay, heard on WRFM on weekend mornings and online at thecirclingfin.com.