No sign of that world out here anyway..

Sonder & Descendant 

part two

All the thoughts that I never heard myself say, which once seemed so important and profound, that I did not have the presence of mind to write down, were actually only feelings that I was having, because when I try to recall them now, to say the words out loud, I find they are suddenly ungraspable and they are made of the same nebulous vocabulary of dreams, or drugs. I am an amnesiac grasping at photographs for proof and witness, but it is like the tightening grip on a handful of sand, "Look, here, this, see!" All the scattered pieces of a broken mirror have the same reflection looking back.

A backdrop panoramic montage of dramatic landscapes and an asphalt ribbon of a road that can only be measured in stops for gasoline and all the photographs seen but not taken. While the space between is strung out on a thread of cigarettes and coffee and medicated by this, that, or the other, if I'm lucky. Where the odometer counts my breaths in miles driven in an hour and the AC wheezes like a ventilator. This is my life support, this is my quarantine, and this is why I cannot seem to find the words to say out loud. I am accelerating and everything has so much distance between it and one point is so far from the next that I lose my way between them sometimes.

Crackling campfire in the Mojave desert, a carnival of coyotes out in the darkness, we are all just passing through this night together. I have pitched my tent on rocks and I will sleep on the ground and let dreams make the sense that I cannot. I will look at the maps and find out where I am going in the morning. Fuck the news, there is no sign of that world out here anyway and I haven't been near another soul in weeks.

It is here in the dark silence between bedrock and eternity where I feel the world forget that I am part of it and any light ever held for me in another's heart, go out. The memories of all the lives I held close and dear, finally run their own course too until they flicker then glitch into the past tense. Now I cannot guess a single thing about their lives, just as they cannot guess a single thing about my own and for the first time in my life I am truly alone. 

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

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.