Writings / Poetry: Cassidy McFadzean

Phantasmagoria

The photographer of the tsar, Prokudin-Gorsky,
made famous for documenting the Russian empire
at the turn of the twentieth century. He captures
the Kama river like glass before the horizon;

bulbous onion domes; emirs with dark beards and
silk costumes, their fingers adorned with gold rings
and fat purple jewels; young peasant girls with braided
hair posing in front of log cabins, aprons stained with dirt

and grease; farmers lugging tall wicker baskets of potatoes;
stone fences and trodden paths winding like a labyrinth.
It is all in colour: Three monochrome frames taken
seconds after one another. Nearly simultaneous,

viewed through red, blue, and green filters, and spliced
together. A Technicolor image of the composite scene.
How am I to believe that people today are the same?
It is only their clothes that have changed. But photographs

are only spells, little lulls of trickery. When the plates
of colour do not line up exactly—a bump of an elbow
a twitch of a limb— and instead of the lucid outlines
of figures, their clothing preserved, their postures straight,

there will be a ghostly shadow of colour, some twinge that is
never captured in reality. I would never find blue or red
shadows following me, but they are present in ghosts,
the only hint that pictures are a make-believe game.

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