Like dust in the sunlight of a room..

Sonder & Descendant 

part one

I went from traveler to vagabond when my love of exploring new places got confused with my impulse to run. One year became five. People moved on with their lives, like I had meant to do with my own. Now I am filled with ghosts and landscapes and I do not know what to do with them. Months and years tear from the calendar, one after the other, and the pages carried off by a cartoon dust cloud behind a speeding car.

Such amnesia between the photographs I have made. They land in my awareness like distress flares thrown into the darkness of my unconscious. They illuminate everything for just a moment, letting me see what has been standing right there the entire time, before I am plunged back into forgetting all over again.

In the world between the photographs my memories cannibalize themselves in the fight for remembrance, and they seem to be driven purely by my emotional life, by how I am feeling at the time. This sounds terrifying and fragile, but I fear this may be true for all of us. The significance of our memories is ever changing, shifting in and out of focus with time and perspective.  

Photographs are indeed life markers, but not always because of their content, location, or the person depicted, but simply because there happens to be a photograph in the first place. This is where a photo's true value can grow out from too. From It’s own mysterious presence in the world, demanding that we connect with it then leaving us full of questions. How can photos of a seemingly insignificant moment in life become as precious to us as the actual life defining memories where no photographs were made at all? Perhaps photographs are artifacts from our lives and possessing them is proof of our participation in it

Without photographs I would truly be lost in time in a world without gravity, and all the pictures that were not taken when I had the chance, will float there, like dust in the sunlight of a room where I lay on the floor slowly regaining consciousness.

Both Sonder and Descendant are available to order from Bump Books.

This life between the photographs..

What I have noticed about my own relationship to photography after recently spending time looking at my archive, is the acute awareness of the private narrative of my own life going on elsewhere, outside of the frame. Those photos that I consider more successful are encoded with psychic markers and contain everything I need to know to gain access to this life between the photographs.

Photographs are both time capsule and time machine which can, on an images’ contemplation, transport me back to that initial experience, landscape, person or feeling and, if I have been true to my own vision when making the photograph, it stages authentically, the psychological and emotional conditions which brought about the making of the picture in the first place. The feedback between myself and this distilled object, this photograph, is continuously being mentally reframed with each viewing. The image remains stable in its representation, but myself, as its viewer and author, is in a state of continuous flux across time and it is this feedback which informs my present self of itself in it’s ever changing state.

No place left to turn, but the pictures on the wall..

If there has ever been a painting hung on a motel room wall that I have considered to have any artistic merit whatsoever, It has become a custom and a ritual for me to hide money behind it’s frame. I have done this a number of times now, mostly in budget Mom ‘n Pop places across the country. I do this firstly as an acknowledgment to art itself, as the active spirit and positive energy field in the world for which I am always grateful to encounter.

I also do this because I once decided that cold hard cash was going to be the standard inter-dimensional expression of gratitude to those ancient fringe gods that kindly selected it for me to see. For them, my offerings work on a sliding scale of sacrifice and the spiritual nutrition comes from the heart of the devotion and not in the actual bank notes themselves. The cash belongs to the roaming material being of a future present yet to be determined, but heading this way, crackling with blue sparks and the smell of burning hair.

This deliberate act of sending money into the future in real time, yet to be found as though teleported there in the instant of its discovery, is my small single fruit loop of good fortune, or a mysterious crazy karma turn around for the soul who finds themselves in this room with no place left to turn, but the pictures on the wall. This is my gift to you. 

I think about this person, here, but there and alone, seeking refuge, quarantine or detox and finding themselves laying on this same bed and reaching out, remotely, with their mind, beyond their physical desperation and reasoning, out to the edges of the room with searching psychic tendrils, feeling for the folded bill tucked behind the frame. Enough for either a bag, bottle, pack, a little gas, or a bite to eat. Sometimes not much of something can mean everything to someone. I know this. I also figure, if someone is in the mindset of looking behind motel pictures in the first place, for whatever reason, they deserve to at least find something there, just once, to be announced to the room with the triumphant cry of “I told you so!”.

I check behind them myself too now, in hope of finding important and personal instructions, perhaps from my parallel universe self anticipating my arrival in this cross-space-time-line. I have never found anything so far and if I did, I would not take it unless it was intended for me alone. This is part of the Astral Projectors code. 

More akin to astral codes of conduct..

Traveling and photography are both steeped in superstition. They are surrounded by talismans, curses, amulets, spells and sacrifice. They are submerged in the occult and their knowledge is esoteric and they only give up their secrets with time and to the devoted. Traveling and photography inhabit an elemental world not subject to the same physical laws of the cosmos and these forces are more akin to astral codes of conduct than anything else; They can influence the natural laws around us, but they do not ultimately have control; They are fickle and mutable and driven by invisible wills and once upon a time they would have been described as the ancestors and the secret spirits inside of all things. 

These subtle energies manifest themselves in our material world as the unexpected and the anomaly and they are present in every photograph that we have ever loved and they have helped bring all of them into being.

I suppose we could simply call this luck, or our photographic instinct. That thing we feel in our gut, that we trust, which sharpens with our experience. But, when we find ourselves standing out on a busy city street corner with camera in hand, we will all be secretly praying we have generated the necessary conditions for these super-natural forces to ignite then intervene; A pool of holy light illuminating the lone pensive girl at the cross walk, or a sudden gust of wind which lifts hats, skirts and hands together. Their presence is the name of the hope we all hold close. 

These forces are chaotic/neutral and they are to be respected and regarded in the same way as weather. Although they can be bargained with to a certain extent, they cannot be owned or claimed wholly for ourselves as ourselves. Such assumptions of control and possession run the risk of us being completely abandoned by them altogether, leaving us with nothing but our technical ability and our precious gear. 

Each morning before a day of driving I have already gone through a quiet pantomime of prayers and rituals before I have turned the key in the ignition. I don’t always make a song and dance about it, but instead my workings aspire to be more methodical, like a photoshop workflow of quiet focused attention. Like the Catholics or a Scorpio. Layered mindful steps deliberately taken, one after the other with intention. This is how I can be seen, standing outside my room at The Twin Pines Motel in Flagstaff, Arizona, at dawn, patting myself down, pretending to look for my car keys, but subtly crossing myself with a Rosary and whispering a secret order of words under my bandanna into the amethyst that is tucked into my left hand. 

Happy New Year.