How to put this lightly?
Dead butterflies not pictured.
This was one of the editorial photographs printed on the cover of a Malibu newspaper of a fundraising event for a tragic death, that resulted in further-preventable tragedy.
I feel terrible about making an image that looks so happy, because that was what I was hired to do. I get it: in a cost ratio assessment of life, we cannot sit around in sad heaps for everything. The rub of nausea with me witnessing this “liberating” of life to vainly recover the pain of a human life lost elsewhere, is an idea that was so deeply out of touch with reality. Not to critique the idea either because the notion seems born of the pain from where it came. That pain, not processed, produced more. Perhaps one of my favorite books on pain, The Body in Pain, by Elaine Scarry, describes the relentless systems humans devise to avoid suffering that create only more.
Not pictured are the butterflies that fell out of the boxes, probably due to oxygen starvation. Those that survived were trampled on by feet not watching where they were going. I’m reminded again why I avoid large crowds….
The joyful sunlight and perfect smiles also remind me why I am able to be comforted by darkness and why I always loved Fiona Apple’s song about not going to sleep to dream. As much as I love living in the light, as most mammalian beings do, the metaphorical darkness I’ve had intense contact with has somehow made facing the discrepeancies in human behavior easier to speak plainly about. And it has made the dreamworld, the subconscious, the strange landscapes of the mind easier to navigate. Prior to, I might have been caught up in the moment as anyone else pictured, but the thing about having been a phtoographer is that I had felt so much distance between myself and life. When I am not photographing, I experience so much…maybe too much as it feels. The mentalisation aspect of framing, keeps a business about inside. But without the framing and metering mental activity I have really gotten in touch with the depth from where visions arise, deep inside….but this rabbit hole is not about the vision-body relationship- it’s about caring about what can be done here and now…the choices today that may or may not unfold in the future.
Confessing alleviataes confliction. This image is a strange twist from the typical discourse in war photography, known for the moral issue of to photograph or do something to help, which has really taken to the streets since the advent of the “smartphone” where we all have the aility to become programmable recording bodies. The compulsion to record, makes me wonder if we are ready to record accurately or want to just see the sunshine. The repulsive comment section is like watching a spiritual boxing match on most social media…which is why you were invited down this path in the first place. The “toxicity” of happy only desire spills out into a putrid waft of phony. I suggest we turn the volumne way, way down, get inside an anechoic chamber and hold on to witness that deeper feeling within.
In fact no one can stop things happening far away…or so we say and yet pontificate over expensive coffee and tea about the “butterfly effect.”
The girl who was hit by a car cannot be retrieved. Neither can the dead butterflies.
Perhaps sometimes the best thing to do in life is let ourselves greive. As I can confess more than running from that grief means it will catch up to you later. It will not just fly out of the box into the light joyfully. As the butterflies were hatched for this fund-raising event, I never knew that nearly a decade later the pretty looking picture with heavy reality behind would have so much relationship to my own life.
The weight of sorrow, the burning in the nose, the wetting in the eyes, might be the only thing keeping us from becoming fully robotic in modus operandi.
Cheers to the softness of our beings. It seems they are wiser than our minds.
Analogue images of SEAS Anechoic Chamber in Moss, Norway, are below. These were made thanks to PRAKSIS Oslo’s artistic residency a Global State of Pareidolia.
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