In October, 2012, I came across a 40 year old catalogue of photographs taken mostly by Canadian artist Tom Thomson. They were in a ‘Bulletin’ published by the National Gallery of Canada in 1968, and written by Dennis Reid. Two rolls of unprinted film had been found in one of Thomson’s trunks, by his family, and donated to the National Archives in 1967, fifty years after his death. When the Archives printed the film, it was discovered that several images had been altered by water damage, mould and the inevitable corrosive effect of time. While viewed as a disappointment at the time, in our age of digital manipulation these damaged images seem rather au courant, eerily familiar vestiges of a lost world captured by a now waning technology.weiterlesen