Fictional Truths
I have photographed many mid-20th-century artists; famous, interesting and artful. Those voices from my past haunt me like echoes from an asylum. Over time they have become a menagerie of mirages, one thousand fleeting floaters in the eyes. Maybe I am lost in a forgotten time a forgotten place in time but not in mind. My archives have revealed a life behind the camera. Pages alphabetized all in rows; glowing celluloid images reimagined in dreams. They fulfill and linger in my minds like a caress-able bevy of pillowy cygnets floating atop an entire planets estuaries.
My portrait photography and architectural photography are in my cameras view like fraternal twins: through both I see my friends my history and stories told and to be told.
Hand in hand they live as one: I mindfully approach both subjects with the same language, mentality and necessity to bend into the moment. Capturing a lifetime and everything imaginably alive before. Together they are my forever.
I have photographed many architectural feats. They have become silent revelatory transcendental reminiscences: Volumes of imagery accompanying my mind while stridently shuffling along highways, roads and other conduits of time. My camera continues to ferry my life across many divides.
The human poses are remarkably similar to the architectural poses I convene with. The memories of spaces in dimensions, the memories of people in spaces – -My artists, my architecture, equally in mind appear imagined and real. Canvases conjured and canvases lived in: What kind of mind Is heard; how does the human eye dream differently from my camera lens. My camera attempts to travel effortlessly through Millenniums- -or so I dream. It is a quasi information highway that has an infinite amount of guile attached to it.
A man, mind and time commingle.
Alone in the woods.
The car engine running.
Nature majestically abound.
Locked in view is a mind alive alone frozen in time “Here I am,” is heard. The quiet askance is not sad.
Patiently behind the steering wheel a seventy year-old teenager smiles at the friends in the trees> A gleeful exuberance is imagined in the silent pose: He could never measure the pleasure of the escape into nature.
I could possibly imagine the Huck Finns, and Tom Sawyers gathering as in a sanctuary inside the old man who found a way away.
The unknown to a view, my camera has seen dementia just a few times. I imagined all of the artists’ painted expressionist abstractions, all of Clifford Still’s mentoring and mingling in the artists’ life: There is a dance in my mind: a witness to the celebration of art and nature- -maybe Matisse’s La Dansecomes to mind. The camera sees the humanity and sees the ghost of the past in the present:
Balzac’s voluminous volumes could be comprised in the stories I imagined: Edward Dugmore alone in the vehicle until discovered: The artist trapped in mind and heaven: Nobody will know what the artist positioned behind the steering wheel thought. I know for my camera, it has never been about knowing the truth- -It has always been about communing within the interior of celluloid frames. This man/artist locked in the self: his voice heard in the woods and in mind.
The space of an artists studio, The spaces found in architecture are about understanding the equations: Measure what you see from the end of the lens to the abyss the viewfinder sees. I cannot ignore the beauty of sizing up the dimensions ahead as space in flux: I can only observe the realities I imagine. I utilize which discoveries speak to the experiences in my f/8 maybe f1/ exposures. My camera borrows imagined space to excel in freeze time.
