Burning Bread

“Prepared” by having been in a slow oven overnight, the loaf that appears in Charlie Sinclair’s fine image Burning Bread is perhaps nearly incredible but not quite.  In fact it’s perfectly “straight” photography: the bread has become charcoal, and an image of charcoal burning is well “within the camera’s program” (Flusser).  Still, it burns at the edges of a workable visual fiction: it is ‘reality’ that is manipulated.  It’s a graceful example of the world made photographable, presenting it without encountering the harsh taskmaster of language, with it’s inherent demand for a temporal positioning.