Where did the storm come from? No warning
on the forecast and no warning wind.
We’d put off putting the storm windows on
and insulating the attic when
bang, rain on glass, and no we can’t name
the brown form cringing under the cutbank.
Trees go wild in protest and dogs crawl
sullen into the past. All plans are off.
One cloud covers the world pole to pole.

In these moments, each to his life and each
alone in himself. I ride rough water
under dark skies more than forty years back.
My cousin is rowing. I am going to die.
I am alone on a prairie
waving hello to bison miles off and blind.
Men work hard in a barn. Because I’m open
and warm they disdain me. Women
disdain me because I warp in their glare.

The storm is over. The brown form under
the cutbank’s a badger. What hope’s open
to him? He makes us sick
the way he near slithers, his hair wet
and flat like a villain’s, his every motion
faintly intestine. We say wherever
he lives it’s not fit for others.
Sun fills our kitchen. Tamaracks ask
for this dance and dogs beg food at our door.

The trouble with weather, what’s happening now
we think will go on forever.
Moments are slower than days.
Between storms, we believe our weather ideal,
our home safe from those we can’t stand.
Better we plan our kitchen to trap
whatever light arrives, and whatever creature
huddles in the blue, a storm’s a good time
to remember home is where he says hello.

- Richard Hugo

I grew up with this picture above the television. It’s safe to say I’ve looked at this painting more than any other image. My mother bought it in Stuttgart the year I was born in the city I was born. Whenever I’ve asked her what she sees in it she’d square her eyes, furrow her brow and shake her head. I don’t know is what she says.

This past year helping her sort the house I was surprised when she no longer wanted it. I don’t know why was all she’d say. I hate to let it go, but I have to, I can’t do it any longer. Lips pursed, she said I just can’t. Head shaking she said I won’t.

Forty-one years and it felt fine to pull it free from the frame, it felt good to crumple it into my carry-on. It’s uncanny how quickly things can change. It’s mine now and I can do with it what I like. I can make this beautiful print for example. And then I can give it to you. And then I can just give that to you.
 

Water drops
are no longer cloud
Fruits and leaves
are not tree
Petals are not rose
Tears are not calm sea

Everything that comes off
teaches us to fall

.

Gotas de agua
ya no son nube
Frutos y hojas
no son árbol
Pétalos no son rosa
Lágrimas no son mar sereno

Todo lo que se desprende
nos enseña a caer

- Gloria Posada
 

Can’t remember anything at all
Flamed trees lie in the streets
Can’t remember anything at all
But I’m driving my car down to Geneva

Art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed

I don’t remember where or when I first read that aphorism – a search on the internet reveals a multitude of sources and derivations – yet it’s a sentiment that continues to compel me. My upbringing, my childhood, was not the most ideal. My family is more insular, strange, and mad than most. Even today I’ve a keen access to feelings of loneliness, failure, fear, deprivation, and heartache. Our life then, my life then, was guarded and secret, the timbre was depressed, and what’s more we were poor. There wasn’t a lot except what could be found, held onto, and kept from others.

It wasn’t until high school, when I discovered photography, that I reckoned a way out, if not physically, then at least emotionally. I used the camera to reconnoiter my landscape and I used the darkroom to remake it. In that way I could control it, analyze it’s angles, and make plain the consequences. I’ve always done what I could to make the prints as beautiful as I can, a pleasure I’m reticent to resist, and yet the images, the subjects, the things my photographs show, are not always our best. They are small moments: forgotten, misplaced, unnoticed, rejected, repressed, and haunted. Poetic perhaps, but minor for sure.

Thankfully, I no longer live in that world and yet my art does. Photography is the practice of transmutation; a simple act to make myself better, to recreate a whole. Where I’ve been and what I’ve seen hasn’t always been pretty. To deflect it’s full impact requires constant contemplation, replication, and representation. Too, I’ve learned that secrets don’t help anybody. Indeed, there are those comforted by the pictures I make. These days I share whatever I find with whomever I can.

A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.

- George Bataille, from Documents 1, 1929