YORICK 10
39
Just what you asked for: more personal musings on taking snapshots in the Americas.
Till mid-‘24 my adult life had been tinned to anchovy density. Toilets and clothes dryers shared between total strangers with habits unimaginable to one another. Legs dangling into the SF mist from the fire escape of a drafty Victorian flat, pedicabs beneath New Orleans’ hanging gardens. Gotta get to Job but the shower down the hall’s full up with a guy applying Cremo body wash like Ave Maria. A thousand LAPD helicopters lift off at once and in one second the cost meets every penny you make in one year. New York City. At first I sought this, I suppose. Like a sound bath, the density of human vibration was supposed to do something to me… But then all of a sudden I knew nothing else and it didn’t feel like anything; this in such a way that when I finally came to inhabit new landscape—spans of tangled grass and long Canada goose shits between barns at the edge of the nation—I was quickly reminded that I was lost before and always have been.
I have my photography affliction. A teenage habit of fooling with Fujifilm disposables carried its way into the age of everyone having a computer-camera at their hip, but stubbornly I can’t seem to let go of the original medium I fell for. Limited by a time consuming and less than cost effective process, cooped up with the population I thought I had learned how to see. But after lucky trips ‘cross the country, camping excursions and train rides into the places the roads don’t go, I’d often comment to friends that the unpaved and unmolested parts of the world appear blatantly unphotographable to me. Alone in the crowd you are still a part of that crowd, but alone in the wood you are a tree falling. The aura of the experience “in nature” is not transmittable by frame the same way HOMELESS VETRAN (sic) ANYTHING HELPS GOD BLESS in front of the Nordstrom’s is. There is no menu of emotions for standing staring into an interesting-to-you tangle of sticks in a stretch of forest you haven’t learned the name of. Even the best and most outfitted excursions: Ansel Adams’ painstaking work at Yosemite or Snake River, Sebastião Salgado’s Genesis project, etc., for all their intensity and environmentalist fervor, without accolades and speeches, prizes and further human manufacturings to tell you that “This work means something.” what are these images but liminal art destined for lobbies, the world’s waiting rooms? Or am I fucked up and these images truly move everyone but me? Is it selfish that to “get it” I feel like I’ve gotta be there?
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have any ill feelings about anyone who throws everything they’ve got at trying. I wanna catch a ghost too. Hell, in the last couple of years, without any department stores in my daily life to lurk around I’ve taken a handful of stabs at making the same mistakes. I wonder what I’d do if I had the early innovator connections or the budget of a photography megastar. Maybe you could see these same photos taken with a longer exposure, through something telescopic and incomprehensibly expensive, and still they would give you not one single clue as to what it means to be alive by yourself.
Ah, and an afterthought: I should mention I recently did a quick rewrite of this poem I posted some time back. It’s also about not knowing shit, but its been improved upon for sure.