I would like to talk to you about dust. When I say dust, I don’t mean everyday dust. The dust that covers desks and the cases of record players, that lingers just out of reach atop bookcases or refrigerators. I am not speaking about this kind of dust. Nor am I speaking about dust-bunnies—these creatures of dust that take on a three-dimensional life beneath beds and sofas. Lastly, I am not speaking about metaphysical dust—the sort that makes up angels and which we, in our dusty mortal selves, return to at the end.

No, the type of dust which is the subject of this talk today is of a different kind. And it is a kind that many of you have likely not known to look for though I assure you that you have seen it before. To introduce you to this kind of dust will require a brief journey. Close your eyes. Let the lights in this hall vanish into that red dark behind your eyelids. I will give you some time to adjust.

*

Let us begin at the beginning. You took some photographs, let us say on a 35mm camera. You dutifully shot all 36 exposures, 38 for the more daring amongst you, and you wound back the film. Then you took this film to a pitch-black room—no light was allowed in here at all—and you threaded it onto a metal spool. If you’ve done this before, you likely struggled with the tail momentarily before successfully threading the sprockets. For the rest, this is a hard thing to do, and you may have wrestled with the spool and lost the film in the dark for a long while. No matter. After you threaded the spool, you entered a room that smelled of sulfur. Here, you slowly processed your film, submerging it in a variety of liquids until the images appeared.

It is now time to approach that red light. For while I have been speaking, you have created a darkroom. That red light is the only light allowed in here. In the corners, you will see what look like microscopes. These are called enlargers. You will choose a photograph to enlarge—perhaps one from the Natural History museum, perhaps of two stuffed rhinoceros hornbills—and you will put it into the film carrier. You will make both a contact and a test print first before you put a full sheet of paper beneath the negative carrier and let the timer go for five seconds. You process the print. It looks almost right, and you take it out into the light, blinking. There is a fluffy splotch of white in the center of the photograph. This is the dust we were looking for.

*

In the world of photography, dust is something to be avoided. It distracts the eye, disrupts the scene and, as in the case of our rhinoceros hornbills, draws our eye away from the two birds. It is so loathed that there are cans of air that you can blast your negative with or, if you prefer, a manual rubber blower. Even if you go over every inch of the negative, dust can still enter the scene as you carry it through the air. Analog photographers who shoot in black and white have a tiny bit of white and black paint at the ready to hide this dust or other blemishes—scratches, fingerprints. These blemishes are irritating and can spell the end of an otherwise handsome print, but dust, in its intangibility, is the greatest enemy.

A skeletally beautiful photography professor once told me that a contact print I made had “no imperfections.” His blue eyes pierced my own as he said this, and my heart shuddered. What he meant, of course, was that there was no dust, no scratches, no mysterious unidentifiable marks to distract the viewer from the glossy print of two feet almost touching beneath two chairs.

*

Sally Mann’s series Proud Flesh (2009) documents the deterioration of her lover’s body. Diagnosed with a rare form of muscular dystrophy, his body slowly succumbs to the illness. Mann chose to shoot this tender series with an antique camera, one that naturally marks the photographs— scratching, dotting, and dusting them. Dust, again.
In “David,” a dark hand clutches a hip above luminous thighs that blend into ankles which disappear into darkness. Behind these disembodied legs, there is a mirror and more darkness. In this darkness—the left-hand side to be precise—are sizable specks of dust.
The stance, as well as the photograph’s title, conjure Michelangelo’s marble “David”—a statue of mythic proportions in excellent physical health whose chest ripples in the light. He remains ready to take on anything, despite his age, facing up to Goliath, to tourists, to photographers. Unless some tragedy befalls him, he will be here long after you and I have turned to dust.

So, what does it mean that Mann’s “David” is accompanied by white speckles, by marks of dust? It is a witness to this David’s mortality. Beyond the body, muscles flexed and taut, the dust is a sign of humanity. It illustrates what the body cannot. Let us not conflate this with death—this dust has little in common with the haunting figure who stalks Ingmar Bergman’s knight. Rather, this dust is whimsical, tinged with melancholy, a gentle testament to a body that will fail.

*

In Chris Marker’s short film La jetée (1962) there is a lot of dust. The film is composed almost entirely of still photographs, enlarged on one of those microscopes we met earlier. The photographs are arranged so that sometimes it feels that the characters are moving when really only the photographs are changing. Over this, we hear a man’s voice narrating the end of the world. World War III has broken out and the nuclear aftermath has led the survivors underground. In a series of still images, Paris vanishes before our eyes. Although the images depict ruined buildings, these photographs, many of them taken from newspapers during World War II, are noticeably lacking in dust. They are grainy, blurry even, but free from dust. Darkroom technicians likely spent hours poring over them, looking for every floating speck and drenching the white in black.

The dust emerges when our protagonist is caught by German scientists, who attach him to a contraption where his eyes are obscured by a foam mask secured with wires. Different wires are attached to his limbs. The scientists tell him that they want to see whether he can go to other worlds to glimpse what a future on this planet might look like. They also tell him that no one has succeeded in this without dying. The experiment begins.

The man struggles and suffers before encountering a woman in still images. She is both a revenant and a familiar. The man does not understand how, or why, but she is the strongest image that he holds in his memory. He remembers her smile, her eyes, the way her hair falls gently across her forehead. She accepts him as an apparition who walks with her, not questioning his appearances, not asking about where he comes from, or what brings him to her. They walk together and explore a Natural History museum, peering into glass cases, passing two stuffed rhinoceros hornbills.

Around them, in every corner of every photograph in the museum, is dust. Dust so thick that you can count the pieces individually. Dust clings to the dark places but to the light ones too. The woman peers into a whale’s mouth—both woman and whale are subsumed by dust, marking each of them, uniting them.

*

Before we go on, I would like us to pause over the dust in this photograph. More precisely, over what exactly we are looking at. Remember we are in a darkroom. Marker made this film in a distinctive way—namely, he took photographs and then he filmed them on cellulose acetate. What to the naked eye first appears as effortless, photographs moving to look like a film, comparable to a flipbook, is rendered infinitely more materially complicated by this decision.

Put simply, Marker shot photographs and then he, doubtless with some assistants, processed them. Then he spread them out, perhaps on a table, perhaps on the floor, and took out his film camera. He filmed these photographs—that is to say, filming what had already been filmed. He then processed these film reels, dipping them in and out of liquids. If you are puzzled over this, I do not blame you; it begins to resemble a kind of calculus.

And this is important because of where the dust comes in. The dust in the photographs in Marker’s film follows a pattern. If we look closely at each still, we discover that the clouds of dust are similar. They stick to the black places, especially the corners. What does this mean, you would do well to ask. It means that there was consistency when these photographs were taken. They were taken on the same camera, processed in the same way, and experienced the same dust.

*

If you, like my photography professor, remain wary of dust, then you will be wondering what this dust indicates for Marker. Does it reveal that he was a lazy processor? That he and his assistants ignored the white speckles in each of these photographs? Although Marker and his team were pressed for time, this theory strikes me as implausible. With a team of any size, and a shade of black ink, the prints could have been adjusted with little difficulty. Since many of the speckles appear in the black edges, this would have been very straightforward – simply a matter of making sure that the black ink blended into the print. They were not faced with hard dust. Dust is harder to handle when it appears in gray areas and, worst of all, white zones.

Or does it indicate that they didn’t see these spots perhaps—that Marker and his team’s eyes had not yet grown accustomed to dust as ours have. But remember that Marker was not only a filmmaker; he was also a skilled photographer. No photographer could miss these spots. Marker had easy dust, the kind of dust that photographers who seek perfection, envy. How easy it would have been to have taken a tiny paintbrush and dabble over the places of white fuzz. Yet Marker chose not to. Let me say this again: Marker chose to keep the dust.

Unlike Mann, he was shooting on a camera that was not intended to gather dust, or scratch the film, or damage it. But nonetheless, he kept this dust. He kept it because this film is inherently about dust.

*

We have understood this without knowing it from the beginning. The scientists select the protagonist because of the image of this woman in his mind. An image so clear that it appears as a photograph, one with the slightest trace of dust. His captors send him after the image in its entirety. His search for the woman, for this exact image of the woman, is inextricably tied to dust. To look for one is to look for the other.

In this post-apocalyptic world, dust is as precious as the face of a beloved. Real, tangible dust is something to be sought out, to yearn for. It is an indication that there were people present. That someone, once, processed this photograph, handled it, and took it out into a world filled with sunlight where it caught a bit of the material of humanity.
Dust is our natural trace. But it goes further than us. Dust belongs to the rhinoceros hornbills, to the whales, to the trees, to distant starlight, to every part of the natural world. To search for dust is to look for life.

*

And the protagonist discovers this for himself, and for us, too. One morning, a magical thing happens. From the protagonist’s perspective, we see the woman open her eyes, blinking in real time, her hair messy against the pillow. This motion lasts for only a few seconds before the film returns to photographic images.

Marker had a limited budget, and he could only afford to shoot a few seconds in motion. So, why did he select this scene? He had a range of far more visually dynamic ones to pick from—the destruction of the world, the travels of the hero and heroine, the torture of the protagonist, but he picked these seven seconds.

Seven seconds in which one of the most mundane human gestures comes to life before our eyes. And in that gentle blinking, we become aware of the thrumming of blood in our fingers, the beat of our hearts in our chests. But not just our own. We realize that the person beside us in this room, across the street, in the museum with us, that they, too, have this heartbeat, that this blood runs through their veins.

*

During his travels, our protagonist leaves the woman and is visited by beings from the future. When their initial suspicions about him fade, they invite him to join their number and leave the wreckage of the world behind. Around them white speckles glimmer. Are they stars? Or are they dots of dust? And aren’t they in effect the same thing?

But our protagonist declines and instead asks to visit the image of the woman that he has in his mind. His dusty visitations have confirmed the love that he holds for her. Instead of choosing future dust, dust filled with potential, he chooses their shared dust, his and the woman’s, dust that they made and encountered together. The beings accept and he arrives at Orly. He sees the woman, her lovely face looking back at him, and realizes too late that his captors have followed him here. One of them aims a gun at him. We know what comes next – an ending envisaged but never before felt.

*

We cannot escape dust, nor can we erase it. It is our apparition, tenderly accompanying us as we wend our way in and out of darkrooms into the light. And in this way, there is something terribly touching and beautiful about it.

We have come to the end of the lecture. It is time to leave the darkroom. Let us blink our eyes open together.