At the Camera Shop Café...

... you can develop your thoughts.

I took the photograph at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The image is a 2011 effort by Rodney Graham at reenacting a 1937 "Small Basement Camera Shop."

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ADDED: I liked the angled view of this large light box (because of the way it shows the corner of the room), but let me give you the head-on view so you can get a better sense of what it is. This is a still image — a "chromogenic transparency" — lit from the back, and it's a posed scene, set up to look like a place in the past. The man in the picture is the artist:



It's about 5-foot square and made a big impact in person. It was fun to look at. And it's fun to think about. It's a photograph, but so much bigger and brighter than a normal photograph. It's a photograph of an old photo developer place, which would never have processed anything that came out at all big and bright, just those little grimy things people got out of their cameras. And it's a dingy little basement establishment, so grim and small, but so poppingly bright in this image. It's like a meditation on how you can't go back to the past, the images of the past are in your mind, and your mind is so powerful it can believe that YES!!! This was the past! And then you have that angst, that nostalgia, of the past, so lost, so beloved, but, hey, I wasn't even born then. I don't know places like that. And yet, I feel I do. I feel I could step into that world and climb through and out of that basement. It's the way I feel in dreams — the familiarity and the oddness, the real and the unreal.