Memories, memories!
The only print magazine we published, 12 years ago.
Thanks, Andy!
Jean-Jacques Naudet
A thousand years ago in 2013, before there was L’Oeil de la Photographie, there was a photo daily called Le Journal de la Photographie and I was proud to be a part of it. It was a digital only daily and it came to be in the moment when we were all trying to understand what digital only was going to mean. For those like Jean-Jacques and Gilles who had spent their lives in print it was a tearing down of hundred-year-old traditions. For me who had spent his life working on the ephemera that is movies it seemed normal that you could create something that came and went without ever holding it in your hands.
When Jean-Jacques invited me to write for Le Journal, I was incredulous that he valued my opinions enough to give them space on the page. Honored, I found a story, then wrote about who I met and what I saw and how I felt about it. He published it and now I was a journalist. Ha! I called my friends, told the Facebook world about it and walked around all day proud. Then I woke up next morning and found Le Journal was running new stories. Wait I thought, what do you mean it comes and goes so fast? Well, the truth is, it had always come and gone so fast. Ever since the invention of the printing press and photography, news and pictures have slipped by faster and faster, until now they are not even a blur. Everything is old news from the moment it is born. Except old news.
Yesterday I attacked a shelf of books and magazines, determined to clear the accumulation of years. Old issues of the Realist, Underground comics, magazines that had mentioned my name, and then I came to something that stopped me in my tracks, the one and only print version that Le Journal had ever printed. It was called the West Coast Edition and it came out in April, 2013, the week that Paris Photo L.A. was in L.A. Memories came flooding back: seeing it in a magazine rack as I walked through the show, staging a photo of friends reading it, my pleasure in seeing my name and story were on the cover. I took the paper home and kept it on the coffee table till no one cared but me, then put it away and forgot about it. Till now.
I have been holding this beautiful old paper in my hands, now seeing it in new light. It started its life the same day as its fraternal twin, the digital edition, but they have aged differently. If you go to the archives, you will find the digital version still perfect and untouched by time, but I’m not sure it’s better for it. We, our bodies and our things, are all marked by the passage of the years, but the digital version lays pristine like a sleeping beauty. Her beauty untouched but her understanding and context stranded forever in 2013.
The physical paper on the other hand has gone warm and faded with age. Its fragility is apparent in my hands. When I read the names, I picture the older versions of the people. I see the pictures with the understanding of all the pictures that have come after, and all that has changed in me. The beauty of a newspaper is the context that envelops everything in it. And the beauty of a physical newspaper is that the context continues to grow with the passage of time. What a wonderful thing.
Andy Romanoff
Andy Romanoff : Stories I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
https://store.bookbaby.com/book/stories-ive-been-meaning-to-tell-you
