/// THE TEST OF TIME

On De Machine by Jaap Scheeren (NL, 1979), chromogenic print, 2010



Fortunately, the AEG washing machine dial is set to OFF. Otherwise, the mix of electricity and water would have caused a short circuit—and not a photograph. In this dormant state, none of the indicator lights—wash, rinse, extra rinse, spin, or end—are lit. Yet, something stirs inside the drum and in our minds: Both energy (for exposure) and water (for development) are essential to creating such a chromogenic print, so what is this glowing enigma before us? An ovum? A cocoon? A planet?

What do we see when we don’t know what we’re seeing, when textures and forms evade our perceptual references? The washing machine’s glass door acts as both lens and barrier, obscuring the white orb’s nature. In the context of a washing machine, this may seem far-fetched, but for me, several of photography’s core characteristics converge in this single image—though this would require the length of an essay.
                Since 2010, when I bought a print of this image from my salary at Foam Magazine, De Machine has silently watched over my living spaces—while life shifted and new constellations formed around it. Meanwhile, the photographic universe—how images come into being and disappear, how they are handled or traded, and accordingly, how we perceive them—has, over the same period of fifteen years, moved light-years ahead. The shifts could hardly be greater: from the analogue negative-positive process, like Jaap’s work, to digital registration and calculation processes, from automated to augmented, and now prompted processes.
                Viewed from the outside, all photos (and white orbits) may appear alike. But from the inside—technologically, materially—they are worlds unto themselves. Perhaps like a planetary system: each process orbiting its own logic, rhythm, and pull. Jaap’s machine rinses my thinking about how photographic images are made and understood on a daily basis—across the cycles of the medium into the future.