Generation Loss Read Online Free PDF Page B

when I googled her, I'd learn more. There was some stuff online,
including Susan Sontag's repudiation of Mors, but little in the way of
biographical information except for a thumbnail entry on Wikipedia. Despite her
name, Aphrodite was as American as I was, a third-generation Greek who'd grown
up in Chicago. But there were no details about her childhood, and only a
fleeting mention of her marriage to Haselton.
    I
don't know anyone who looked less like her namesake. Aphrodite Kamestos was
beautiful in the way a violent storm is beautiful, if you're watching it from a
safe distance. In his photo, Haselton must have caught her unawares. Her head
is half-turned, her dark hair falling back from her race, her lips parted and
eyebrows slightly raised. Her eyes are startlingly black against her white
skin, and the light glances off her cheekbones. The gaze she shoots at the
camera is direct yet impenetrable. She looks unafraid, but also unguarded,
caught in that fraction of a second before she could compose her face into
welcome or annoyance or desire or attack.
    It
was a strikingly beautiful face, but it didn't make me think of the Goddess of
Love. It made me think of Medusa, someone whose beauty would be turned upon
anyone stupid enough to mess with her. That was the power of the photograph. It
didn't make you wonder what happened to her. It made you wonder what happened
to the guy who took the picture. It's almost anticlimactic to know that he
killed himself in 1976.
    My
Google search turned up some of her own images as well, but that was such a
depressing experience I wished I hadn't bothered. I hate looking at bad
reproductions of great photographs, and these online images were uniformly
lousy. Generation loss—that’s what happens when you endlessly reproduce a
photographic image. You lose authenticity, the quality deteriorates in each
subsequent generation that's copied from the original negative, and the
original itself decays with time, so that every new image is a more degraded
version of what you started with. Same thing with analog recordings. After
endless reproduction, you end up with nothing but static and hiss.
    This
doesn't happen so much with digital imaging, but what I found online had been
scanned from a 1970 pirate reprint of Kamestos's only two books, Mors and Deceptio Visus, first published in the late 1950s. Anyone who picked up
that pirate volume could be forgiven for wondering how Aphrodite's photos ever
saw the light of day. Unfortunately, those horrible reproductions were what had
filtered onto the web. They were nothing like the images in the original
editions of Mors and Deceptio Visus —I knew that because I owned
both books—and those, of course, would be nothing like the original prints.
    Her
greatest images were vistas—islands, mountains. Highly saturated blues and
violets and magentas detailing an impossibly beautiful, distant archipelago
that resembled a landscape by Magritte: elusive, irrecoverable. I couldn't
imagine those places were real.
    Only
of course they were—the pictures were taken in 1956, decades before computers
made it possible to twist the world into a pretty shape.
    That
was the year Kodak started hyping the Type C color process. Type C enabled
photographers to produce their own color negs without relying so heavily on a
lab, and there was some interesting color work done then by people like Nina
Leen and Brian Brake. I don't know if Kamestos was using Type C, but she would
have been picking up on some of the press it was generating. You can see in her
husband's photo how those eyes still burned, though her hands looked as though
they could handle a garrote as easily as a camera.
    It
was a suspicion fed when Mors appeared: a catalog of places where
terrible things had happened. Suicide, a murder, sexual torture. These weren't
like Weegee's crime scenes, or Bourke-White's photos of Buchenwald. Kamestos's
pictures lacked immediacy or historical import; their sense of