It will all make sense some day..

Sonder / Commentry #1

A parking lot on the vast southeastern plains of Colorado where the horizon is 360 degrees of wild unbroken prairie under a massive cloudless summer sky. I am far away from everywhere all over again. It's hot and a blustery July wind harasses me, tugging at my clothes incessantly, pulling from all directions, promising to drive me mad if I don’t take cover from it soon.

This is a photograph of me, taken in 1864. I have seen myself in history, like this, many times before, but it is not often I have had the presence of mind to get a record of it with my camera. It was part of a tourist information display at the site of the terrible Sand Creek Massacre. This photo is a close up of a larger group photograph of the US Volunteer soldiers that were part of it. It looked out at me and seemed to make eye contact from across time and across a parking lot like a spectral face in a distant scrying glass.

The face is one of the 675 anonymous murderers of 750 Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians which took place on the morning of November 29th 1864. Under the commanded of Colonel John M. Chivington and using small arms and howitzer fire, the troops drove the people out of their camp. While many managed to escape the initial onslaught, others, particularly noncombatant women, children, and the elderly fled into and up the bottom of the dry stream bed. The soldiers followed, shooting at them as they struggled through the sandy earth. During that afternoon and into the following day, the soldiers wandered over the field committing atrocities on the dead and dying before departing the scene on December 1st.

I don’t know why this photograph is me, but I don’t know why I am me either as I stand here looking at it today. And, as I begin to make a photo-record of it, I hold this question close, just in case the revelation that I am certain it holds, has a fuse on it. I let photographs naturally impose their own cool presence of mind upon the scene and I try, in this instance, to keep my-self out of it. The hope being that it will all make sense some day, later, upon reflection, tomorrow maybe.. I trust photography with all of these mysteries of the world and I have come to regard my camera as another sense apparatus with which to perceive it.

The wind finally snags my hat and I chase it through the long grass, flapping my arms and shouting like the madman it promised it would make of me.

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

A cold blue flame in a dark car..

Process

Pigs, chickens, rats, cats and always dogs. Bedroom live-haul and all that death where I dream. Fictitious straight shooters share half truths with meandering doubt. The yard dog blues. Plant / protein, main line, evis, cut up and pack out. Plumes of feathered souls go up in smoke or leave in trucks, dripping bloody icicles. Malevolence is a cold blue flame in a dark car. Noel. (no one ever leaves), so we sit on the curb and wait.

It is not about being able to remember..

 

Sometimes I have been known to “balance the books”, karmically, on an experience I have had against the photographs I made during the experience itself. I have been especially conscious of doing this when the experience was not an entirely positive one. In these cases I always hope the photographs will serve someday as a kind of redemption for me. I hope that the pictures rescued from negative experiences will later transcend themselves and deliver up some higher positive truth, a glimmer of closure, or a reason why it was all meant to be. In the past, photographs have in fact been the only positive thing I have been left with and having the photographs, possessing them, is somehow like my way of taking back control again, to make the final definitive sense of. This sounds like a lot to hope for from photographs, but if our lives are actually the stories we tell ourselves, then photographs can be an integral part of telling that story.

In the looking back at these pictures, these disturbances from the surface of the world, I am instantly informed of how sharp my photographic instinct really is. I mean the truth of it, for better or worse, there before me. What are the images that work, and why? What did I try to photograph, but failed to? What did I miss altogether and for what reason? What photographs did I wish I’d taken? Which photographs would be considered key images now that they can be viewed together? Looking at collected pictures can be a meditation on how I have perceived my life and how much I was paying attention while living it.

Looking at one's own photographs can indeed be full of personal revelation when viewed from a distance and in the safety of one's own home and assembling them is where I have found the parallel narrative of my life emerges out from. These pictures plot their own path and carry their own weight and insist on telling their own story, not truth and not fiction, but something which weaves between the two and is perhaps more akin to poetry.

Photographs are a conduit for my experiences and they put me in direct contact with the past, which is, for me, not about being able to remember, but rather to re-inhabit it from the present with all my original injuries and hindsight wisdom in tact. If photographs can be considered the fruits of these experiences, then the feedback they generate reminds me, ultimately, that no experience is wholly positive or negative.

In order to make this leap back through time it is often not the photograph's subject that I need to connect with, but to instead find a psychic entry point, either within an image or it may be the image itself. A seemingly benign picture can be a portal back into the world of that photograph and it is there that redemption can sometimes be found. They are a chance to reframe and resolve the past through a constellation of photographic anomalies, with the hope of finding meaning, clarity and then finally, healing.