The road to the northwest from the Bay Area. May 5, 2022.
As I release this latest collection from my trip to Portland, I will lay bare a developing insecurity based around my recent aesthetic sensibilities. In this album, you will see trash in plastic cups, some dirty windows, and an abstract, out-of-focus blanket. Likely the most visually pleasing thing you may find will be the raindrops on the windshield set against the green Oregon countryside. I have been pulled towards what I can only describe as "mundane" photography, which has some of its roots in my previous interest in textures as well as my growing love of the liminal space genre, but is built on a separate thematic framework of which I now feel some obligation to elaborate on.
I'll admit that after reading Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, I have been stirred in my heart so helplessly by the philosophies of James Agee and the photography of Walker Evans-- to fall in love so completely with creation that every inch of reality no matter how mundane is a manifestation of beauty, capable of being art in itself and yet intentionally separated and distinguished. I admired that Agee could reflect on the planks of cheaply constructed wood propped up as the walls of tenant farmers, understand that they represented a social structure that cared little for whether its working class could survive apart from the bare minimum and simultaneously marvel at the intricate flow of the earthy shades residing in their frames-- to see both their suffering and their beauty and perhaps how the relationship of one affects the other.
There's no doubt in my mind that the beauty of reality is intrinsically tied to its impermanence and especially its pain, and whatever method we use to express ourselves through the creation of beauty must address this burden on our souls. It was in this way that Agee's writing on the lives of tenant farmers living in poverty articulated a truth that I knew deep in my heart. However, as he hinted at in his musings on suffering, there is a temptation in art to stake its validity on the level of suffering it captures and as a result to fetishize the archetype of the "suffering artist'', which is why Agee and Walker were so adamant in refusing to claim their work as art. It is here that, as Metropolitan Anthony Bloom noted, suffering is only given purpose if it is mingled with love. And so, in documenting these people, Agee and Walker desired to use their craft as a means of loving them unconditionally and articulating that love rather than exploit them for the sake of art or journalism.
I speak of this because frankly the dichotomy of art and pain has been sitting unarticulated in my mind, and because I suspect that the title of this album might be alarming to some, and perhaps even a little confusing given the mundanity of the photography. It was in my car driving to Oregon that I felt a growing inspiration to photograph the environment that surrounded me, and to both grieve the impermanence of time and to fall in love with the scuffs on my dashboard and the goldfish wrapper in my trash cup as I did the woman next to me and the family I was visiting.
I ask for the reader's forgiveness if what they see doesn't stir them in any way, but I hope that they can find some comfort in these photos as I have.
