I collect photographs by a man named Wallace Nutting. You can read about him here and here. But it’s not the man who interests me–it’s his work. He hand-colored his early twentieth-century photographs of rural Americana, making them lovelier, richer, more dramatic than the photographs alone would have been.
I’m fascinated by this twice-removed notion of reality, the notion that reality can be changed, shaped, and re-formed any number of times. We revere photographs as better representations of the world-as-it-is than, say, paintings or drawings. But they aren’t, really. The world is fluid, ever-changing, and no two people ever see it the same way.
Whose reality is the most real?
But don’t fret that I’ve gone madly philosophical. I had a Mommy/Daughter date with Pomegranate today to see this. It took me two-thirds of the film to get used to Meryl Streep’s Chaplinesque performance and the whole rest of the day to get over seeing my beloved Mr. Darcy/Colin Firth drooling over a very hot guy. *sigh*
