Check out today's Sunday New York Times and the back of the Week In Review section. There you will find four wonderful panoramic photos of Banda Aceh by Tyler Hicks, printed four columns wide. They have the telltale notch in the black film edge on the upper right corner, meaning they were taken with a Hasselblad Xpan. And they're taken on film. Lush, creamy, real black and white film. Wow, do they have impact.I've started printing some of the color panoramics from Venice. They startle me. Venice has, since the trip, become a black and white city. I have passed through that interval between the end of a trip and before I have seen the photos, where the memories of the experience are stronger than the presence of the photographs from it. The photographs are beginning to subsume that memory. Susan Sontag would have had some trenchant commentary about this state.
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