We are the true travelers, the visionaries, worthless and free...
A year ago, I began this space and then I got Covid. It was the first and so far only time. I was fully vaccinated, I got very, definitely sick but not dangerously so, however, the lasting fatigue was palpable.
I emerged from the illness into many new projects which took me through the year and I never got back to writing here.
Next week is my birthday and suddenly writing is back on my mind. It is irritating me, like things tend to do. That nagging. I am exasperated. I have just completed the art exhibition I was beginning to launch a year ago. Feeling slightly sorted. Like I did what I needed to do. And here it is, that damn nagging.
“You don’t get to take writing off the table.”
That’s what it sounds like. It is telling me this and I know from experience, it’s really best to just surrender as quickly as possible and get on with it. So here I am today, writing this post.
I know why I am here. I know why I began this space. I want to further explore combining my writing with my photographs.
I’ve always fancied myself a bit of a Gonzo journalist. I subscribe to subjective objectivity. I explore reality through the lens of my experience. I observe directly. My understanding is derived from research paired with observations of people and events. This is how I can arrive at a reasonable assessment of what is real. And this assessment can and will evolve.
My photographs have always felt like a record. Which is largely what photographs are. And I have asked myself, what are they recording? What is it that I am looking at. What I am I saying? Images have the ability to express like poetry. A transmission. Past ideological thinking. An impression. A sensation. So though I love to write and it is my first art, before music, before photography; when I speak through photographs, that is what I am doing. I use images because that is what is required.
I have the ability to write. I didn’t have to learn it. It’s an innate capacity. Photography is a language, so in my mind, it stands on it’s own.
Pairing words with photographs rather than explaining, however, is something I am quite drawn to. I feel compelled. And compelled to do it in my own form and style.
My recent exhibition on Canyon Road of Freed From Rage and Sorrow has quite impacted how I view the project and the work. Two distinct bodies have united into one, yet maintain their distinctiveness. Like chapters or perhaps books in a saga, they are different points of view, subjective and objective, historical and experiential.
And so, since my creative reality and identity spans several disciplines, I find my journey continues to do the work of breaking barriers in form and reality. There is no separation. Academic modalities are not an absolute truth. I am free to dance the song that I sing; in word, in film, in sound and in silence.