dinner without you.
I have a certain long time love affair with photography. A love that has enchanted me in one way or another since I was small. I remember as a child sifting through the images of my parents as children, young adults, getting married. It was a life before mine, yet linked. It was as though through the portal of an image I emerged into a memory that was my own, yet wasn't. Bits and pieces were familiar, places, unlined faces of people I only knew with the marks of time weighing upon them, the mirrors of wisdom. There was so much kindredness in these moments that I would feel myself slip into the revery, the memory, of the pictured moment. A story would spin and I would be there and I would smell the scent of roast beef and mint jelly wafting in from the kitchen, see the cast off toys just out of frame, hear the voice of my great-grand mother chortling as she drew images of her famed wisligumps.
what he would have read.
he loved me, he loved me not, he loved me.
i will keep you safe.
Photography seems to do this like no other medium. It offers us the opportunity to dip into an experience, to construct all the other circumstances surrounding a moment from what we see. It stimulates our senses and imagination. Sure now a days we have things like the virtual reality helmet that stimulates all five sense such that we can momentarily be transported into another life, another moment. This phenomena perhaps allows us a more tangible experience of what it would be like to be in a given place at a given time. I read once about a Masai man's virtual reality experience of being in Mongolia at a horserace and he talked vividly about the thrill of watching the tangle of horses hurtling along, the rush of voices and clattering hooves, dust clouds, how the experience was palpable. And perhaps we all need a larger dose of this in our lives, to step into a lifeboat full of refugees as the coast line of Greece rises into view. But for me there is something about these moments arrested, captured and held that is everlasting. The image of the boat from the shore, the tangle of horses in the dust cloud. A photograph allows for meditation on what is fleeting. To hold these moments in our hands like so many grains of sand, there is something to this. Something to this space for repeated reflection.
parallel play.
a convergence of the spirit animals.
ghost of the wanted child.
to keep this house afloat.
alone in a great wood.
This fall I began a photo essay collaboration with a dear friend. We both hold a strong creative imperative as central to our lives and share a certain aesthetic, so it made my heart skip a beat when she agreed to let me tell a piece of her story, to take a piece of her story and run it through my own mill of imagining and projection and then put it out in the world. Five years ago she lost her beloved in a harrowing battle to ALS. She was left with the struggle of moving forward without the father of her daughter, without the man she had imagined building home and growing old with. Instead of an expanding family and life there was a space of loss, an imposed contraction. This photo story glimpses at the grief and emptiness of loss while hoping to reflect the deep love between a mother and a daughter. Without fleshing out the story much more for you, I hope this takes you in for a moment.
biding farewell to your ghost.
what she held on to.
to bury the past is not to forget.