The Chimney Casts the Shadow of a Tree
New York
2024
The camera, like a parasite, replaced “my mind’s eye” with a mechanical, digital eye (I); and the photographer lives through the present as if it had already become the past, a restless stranger stuck in his own memory, like a martlet, landing only when it dies. The photograph resembles and eventually replaces what was, “the living image of a dead thing”; It affirm the past, and thus necessitated affirmation, metaphors that eclipsed their referents.
Caught in the undertow of absurdity and the uncanny, photographs present a vision seemingly outside of time, and yet attacked by the same elements of its creation, light and time—"eternal duration is promised no more to men’s work than to men.” The camera’s hallucinatory revelations are no less real than memory, and just as fragile as the mortal beings that, often
unwittingly, captured them. Strange meanings are revealed in retrospect, incomprehensibility is a thing to be embraced.