Mark Allen Soderstrom

Unringing the Bell, 2007

Laminated pigment print on rag paper, mounted to rag board on Dibond
(edition of 3)

32" x 43"

 

 

This image is one of the very first photographs I ever took.

 

I was five or six at the time when I shot it using an old Agfa 120 box camera that had to belong to my maternal grandfather.

 

The scene is of the beach at Monterey Bay Academy in California, a Seventh Day Adventist boarding school that my father attended as a youth. The picture was incomprehensible to me as a child. There were not two suns in the sky that day. That would be impossible. But there it was.

 

 

I kept photographing regularly throughout my childhood, but it wasn’t until sixteen years later, studying photographic processing at Humboldt State University, that I would learn of the concept of double exposure. This process involves either exposing the same piece of film or photographic paper two separate times to get a single print with two overlapping images.

 

Learning of this process eventually brought up the memory of my anomalistic childhood beach photograph. However, I did not believe that this process explained my photograph. It took me several years and numerous reexaminations to finally accept that it was indeed a double exposure.

 

When he was six he believed that the moon overhead followed him

By nine he had deciphered the illusion, trading magic for fact

No trade backs...

So this is what it’s like to be an adult

If only he knew now what he knew then…

 

I'm Open

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