Along city streets there are many unintended marks or marks unmoored from their intention, marks that are traces of gestures or actions where the nature of the mark made is incidental or secondary. Marks made for one purpose (such as territorial markings) that can be appropriated for another (including purposelessness). There are those marks left underneath posters now ripped away, secondary marks arising from or carriers of primary marks, painted over graffiti or scratched out (here there is the violence done to others' defacements), and the partially rubbed out. What once signified is now erased, eroded or removed, origins now obscured or forgotten. In all this mark-making there is an accumulation of layers, burial under sedimentation and a loss of significance beyond a witness to there having been a past. That which is past inheres in place. The sense in place of it having been passed through.
Upon declaring a frame, the marks act graphically and a new significance may be played out. Some day the traces will have completely disappeared. It is this evanescence that inheres in photographs.
15 May 2010.
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