Replicate

Another memory: a long drive and a farm beneath the threat of a volcano. Two cars are pulled up and they stop with the familiar fear of missing something. A woman with a skin-pink coat and a deep Californian tan has her camera focused on an information board. It contains a picture of the view already in front of her: the same mountain border, the same cattle-grid gate, the same straight road ending in the same white-brick and red-roof buildings. I watch her flash become the sun of this stowed landscape, before returning to her Land Rover, spitting pebbles as she leaves. She is gone before I have the chance to laugh, and later when I think of this woman and her photographed photograph my brow furrows in wry confusion. At first I thought she was crazy, but increasingly I have begun to consider her a radical, an artist. We are all taking pictures of pictures. That’s what she was showing me.