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… “myself” never
coincides with my image: for it is the image which is heavy, motionless,
stubborn (which is why society sustains it), and “myself” which is
light, divided, dispersed…
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
The photograph is by nature motionless, even immovable, unchanging.
Photography stills the image. It fixes it. It silences it. And it does
that, in part, by situating the viewer in relation to the subject of the
photograph: that is my father as a child; that’s the motel we stayed at
in upstate New York. The photograph speaks of lost time, of the
unrecoverable. Like death, it is still and silent.
These photographs are specifically about decay, which both connects to
death and differentiates itself from death. Decay is a process—a process
is so slow that there is a stillness about it—a false stillness. For
like an Eadweard Muybridge series, each photograph that could be taken
over time is different. Loss is mutable.
There is, I hope, something fluid and moving about this body of work,
something that resists placement, something that thwarts recognition,
something that defies being pinned down. These photographic lightboxes
are about the obliteration of the habitual, which for good reason has
the same Latin root as habitation, which relates to the food and shelter
theme of the images, and not only food and shelter, but specifically
cultivation and architecture, outgrowths of civilization. And what is
civilization but the cementing of placement and location. We stop
moving, so we must cultivate the land to sustain us. We must build
buildings to keep us safe. That is what these photographs portray and
resist.
David Solow
February 2003 |