I posted an image I’d created, based on a cockroach, a post-card, and…well…a cockroach.  It was a photomanipulation, based on my impressions of Franz Kafka, and the postcard of Kafka that I’ve photographed on numerous occasions.  I’d purchased that postcard in Prague with the intent of sending it to someone, Victor, most likely…or to Corey; it was a potential postcard with no real recipient in mind. 

 

I took a photo of the postcard, surrounded by other things in my current apartment, but in merging it with the image of a cockroach spied in the basement of a dental office,  the photo I made began to resemble an image snagged from the internet…the whole context of that image shifted, and in ways that Kafka himself would understand: all references to the artist began to disappear as if the artist’s work denied the very existence of the artist—well, in my case with the Kafka image, a photograph denying its own nature as a modern photograph; it would seem that in the very spirit of Kafka’s story, “The Metamorphosis,” my digital-photographic homage to that story pulled a Gregor Samsa routine and changed.  Ah, but it wasn’t satisfied to just do that.  No, it had to go and imitate another of Kafka’s famous characters…that guy simply named K.  It had to suffer partly-accidental deletion, only to reemerge in my file in a corrupted state…okay, it didn’t spontaneously reemerge in the cloak of corruption…I grunged it.

 

I’d posted the image, without any awareness that a part of my photograph began to look like something I could easily have snagged from the internet; when I looked back at it, and saw Kafka, in a more ghostly version of the way he appears in Google searches, I figured: why leave the image intact, if it looks like something I didn’t fully photograph myself?  Since I’d removed all of my own photographic elements from the Kafka image, and then layered that “naked Kafka” image on top of a cockroach image I’d taken last summer, I figured I’d do something else to the image, repost it, and leave it at that.  But no!  Somebody (I won’t name names here) clicked DELETE IMAGE and then went on and clicked YES when the confirmation window opened up asking: “Hey dork-wad, are you sure you wanna do that?”

 

Well, to make a short story long, the image vanished, I posted another one instead, then decided to at least acknowledge it AND the comments it garnered and thank everybody whose comments have now disappeared.  I’m putting THIS image in this thread, just as a note to those who commented, and as a warning to NOT click YES when you actually don’t want to delete an image.

 

Oh, and just so you’ll know…I think Kafka would be amused that an homage to him went through the same sort of ordeal that his character named K went through. This image, through no fault of its own, got deleted and changed into a grunged version of itself.  In a sense, this picture IS the essence of the character K…that one guy in literature who just can’t catch a fair break.

I like the post work my friend.

Outstanding work.

If this had been my image, not only would I have printed, matted and framed it. I would have done what you did by posting it in the forum where it could be enjoyed by fellow artists. Thank you!

semel in anno licet insanire!! (Once during the year, being crazy is allowed!)

Very clever mate. Very clever. 

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2008/03/26/a-postcard-from-doctor-kafka/

Dang.  I must have missed this!  A fabulous result ... it should be in your gallery!  When I saw the title of your forum post, I thought you were going to tell a story and incorporate The Mysterious Disappearing Kafka Postcard Story Of That Saturday Night In Chicago.  He does have a way of turning up again, even when one thinks he's wandered off on his own!  :D