[ S T A T E M E N T ]

of influence
of color

of the blue of the deep sea, of the sky on a clear day, of a flame, of veins seen through the skin, of a person sorrowful, dismayed, melancholy
of how “blue is the color of the mind in borrow of the body; it is the color consciousness becomes when caressed; it is the dark inside of sentences, sentences which follow their own turnings inward out of sight like the whorls of a shell,” writes William Gass in On Being Blue
of the extravagance of the blue, ground from lapis lazuli, in Les très riches heures, a fourteenth-century book of hours
of its one-hundred and thirty-one miniatures on leaves of parchment of its division of day and night for the purpose of prayer

of photography

of photograms—made from things I scavenged on walks—their one-to-one ratio of object to image, photographic images made without a camera, made by placing objects directly onto a light sensitive surface and exposing it to the sun

of the elapses of time fixed by the interaction of light with chemistry on paper, fixed moments otherwise infinitely divisible, otherwise lost, transfixing me

of Barthes & Sontag

of how photography and loss are bound, inextricably
for what more is Barthes doing in Camera Lucida than writing about his mother, about his loss of her, of her body, her presence, her place in his life?
for why else would he, does anyone, turn to a photograph, if not for the anticipation of, or the recovery of, some loss, even the simple loss of the moment previous, let alone the loss of a parent, of family, of health, of youth, of own’s own self, of the body’s wholeness, of the mind’s innocence, with only knowledge in the place of?
of my absolute knowing then, in my body, that I was dying, am dying, will die, that my body is, that I am is was, nothing more than the twisted pile of metal I was pulled from, nothing more than the rocks and dirt of the hillside we slammed into, nothing more than the sage, cacti, lizards, snakes, birds or flies that surrounded the coffin our car had become, that I am nothing more than the tomb my body is, already was, from the moment I left my mother’s womb
for what am I doing as I sift through a box of snapshots from the past when each photograph points like a finger at stars—“look”, there she is by my side, my little sister, “see,” there I am, walking, there we all are, smiling, ten minutes, three days, a week, a month ago, five years before, forty years since, now, a lifetime of the sound of the shutter, the “noise of time”—click—there, the moment is fixed of this, now, I find I can never have enough of this, I find that I must hoard, that I must shore up against the onslaught of loss; so, while I say photography is death, I say also it is my stay against it, this compulsion, this repetition of moment, of being, of the prolongation of it
of walking now
of how I never resemble Woolf on a street haunt, Thoreau on a saunter, or Baudelaire, the flaneur
for to walk safely I must walk looking mostly at the ground where my path forward becomes the landscape I experience most intensely—cement, asphalt, gravel, dirt or grass, uphill or down, wet, dry, uneven, slippery, rocks, roots, vines, downed branches
of how what I notice are stones, sticks, seed pods, worn scraps of paper, bits of metal of how I often pick up things mother told me not to touch on the meaning of the matter
of how, gradually, all of this coalesced into an artist’s book and of how, eventually, everything falls again to pieces