Buried under a decade..

Resident Alien. Part 1.

For about a month I have been keeping a journal for a project I have started working on. It is sort of a process log and keeping this log it has since become part of that process. By writing about this project I have had the chance to consider it more carefully than I might have otherwise done and the process has been insightful. These insights are now helping to determine the shape of the project. I have already made several entries into this log, but in order to begin sharing it I have to first introduce it, give it some background and context. Please consider this, and whatever I am going to say next, as that introduction.

In 2012 I had an idea for a photobook, but life got in the way and the idea got pushed to one side and then buried under a decade. It was a collection of photos I'd made during the first 4 years I’d spent in the USA, beginning in 2008 and ending in 2012 with a change of camera. In all this time, as my life unfolded in ways I could never have predicted, my thoughts would sometimes return to this work and I promised myself when I finally arrived in a space to give it the focused attention it needed that I would try and honor it. How I was going to honor it exactly I did not yet know, but I was always having these drifting nebulous ideas for it and over time a few of these ideas began to gravitate to one another until, just recently, a sort of conception happened and I suddenly, in a flash, saw the whole completed thing floating in my head. 

In the decade of separation from this work I did not have access to it at all, but my memory of it was always strong and alive in my imagination and I found, through some kind of bedraggled remote viewing, I could work on it and it became an important part of my creative inner life and general sense of grounding. At other times when I’d think about this work I would wonder if it was even relevant anymore as so much time had passed since its making. It was in those moments that I’d realize, that was just me thinking in terms of it having an audience instead of what it really was, an object of my own heart's desire that I wanted to bring into being for myself. Why? because death is always coming and all the witnesses to the making of the photographs are now part of a parallel universe that I can no longer reach, unless..