I am an image-spotter. My gesture of spotting corresponds to the gesture of looking. By removing from the image the white holes in which the eye would otherwise be caught, I prepare the image to be eaten by the eyes. I collaborate with the platonic ideal of lens curvature. I retain the dust that recedes into space according to perspective, that warps with the curve of the lens; I remove the dust that comes to the surface, I remove the surface. To my credit, the viewer is upright before the image that is likewise. And so, she walks into it from behind the camera, into the space directly in front. She looks on ahead, does not rubberneck at dead matter. I hasten the transmission of an anachronistic image: an image of the spotter with his brush and magnifying glass. The image conveys a gestalt of manual labor at the scale of the human body. He is there at the table, but I am not.

I am close-up where dust mingles with grain. The dust it is stuck. Stuck in the time before exposure. The time before enlargement. The time before scanning. But I am not stuck there with the dust. I am in the present, in front of the screen. If only there were for me some dustless original. There is not. To me dust merely appears. Dust appears on the screen; it is its appearance. I disappear it under my “brush.” 

To disappear, I invent an image of my own unseeing. It is grain which I cannot see. (Oh grain, that opaque remainder of transparency! That organic limit of the artificial!) And so, I invent a picture of grain. I invent from my unseeing anticipation a gestalt. The greater the dust affected area, or the more greatly affected the area with dust, the greater my invention. 

I hide in my invention from the viewer with whom I do not share a scale. Her eyes inhabit the image at the scale of the print. Zooming the image out, I show myself the image she will see. I tailor my work to her gestalt. Her I can predict, but I am plagued by the other image-editor. The other dwells where I dwelt and hovers likewise; zooms in and out of the image. But she dwells closer to the grainy surface, is more likened to the object. She finds me out from the present in which I take shape with my “Healing Brush Tool” and my “Clone Stamp Tool.” Like brushstrokes made under magnifying glass, my shape is seen by her. She sees my “hand.”