chris.photo

Lossy (Save Changes to Untitled?)

2025
Photography (Monochromatic) + Text

© chris.photo. All rights reserved. 
001
In the early nineties, I’d spend hours in Paintbrush, the graphics editing programme later renamed MS Paint, spilling the bucket tool into circles, squares, and squiggly shapes, saving so many works along the way that I’d clog up the family computer’s small hard drive with an abundance of BMP files. Eventually, I could only keep a fraction of what I made; the rest went unsaved.
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Closing Paintbrush would prompt a dialogue box asking whether I wanted to save the file, with three options: Yes, No, and Cancel. Deciding whether this thing I’d made mattered enough to keep was oddly philosophical for a six-year-old.

Years later, the camera would inherit Paintbrush’s role as a place to make marks, and I’d internalise the dialogue box’s role when operating its shutter.
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008–009
***

I take in the morning air from the rooftop. To my left, a line of dragon statuettes faces the ocean. To my right, beyond the park and the basketball courts, the Island Line runs parallel to Victoria Harbour; the trains on this small section of track enjoy their brief sojourn aboveground before descending into tunnels for the rest of their passage west.

The toy camera emits its ersatz shutter sound. What appears on its tiny screen is not what I saw or see. The harbour has disappeared. The MTR becomes a diagonal smudge, and buildings compress into Tetris-like configurations.

I head for the stairwell. The door closes behind me, its latch echoing in the surrounding dimness.
010
The humidity and heat of summer have lifted, and in their absence, I notice the scent of burnt coffee. Trucks reverse behind me. Down on the ground floor, the cargo bay is replete with activity.

The toy camera is in my hand. My own subtraction machine. It takes this singed atmosphere, reducing what lands on its sensor to a basic chiaroscuro of zeros and ones.

It only thinks in simple terms.

A high-definition photograph claims to own what it sees. It attempts to freeze time. These images, however, are born poor: the toy camera simplifies from the start. Through its impoverishment, it seeks clarification.

***
011–012
That old PC with Paintbrush didn’t make it to my teenage years, nor did Mum. By the time I was finishing school, the rest of us had retreated into the folding shadows of laptops. The camera is also a lonely machine, forever living in what has been.
013
Each afternoon around 4 pm, I go up to the rooftop. The dragon statuettes regard Lohas Park across the harbour. The camera cuts them from time’s flow. The shutter falls, and the noise—the static in my head, the grain in the frame—goes still.
014

chris.photo    Chris Sullivan