I have nowhere to put my life except for my body. And yet.
This body of work is tied together not by subject, but by mood. It is the ache and burn of the years blistering in your hands, the lukewarm grief for all the stories of your life that could have been but instead stumbled off into the shadows and were lost. Our lives are but incarnations of light, built and sustained by it. This world, particle and wave, is made of that illumination, and history is but the genealogy of light. And in this way, at the fundamental level, nothing is ours to keep. The world is a wasteland of ownership, have you ever tried to hold light in your hands? These images are born from the tension that grows out of the longing to hold onto moments and the impossibility of their true preservation.
Photography is so close to living — no graphite, paint, or pen to translate the animate, and at the same time it is fundamentally contrary to life: the forms preserved so closely but motionless, forever, in a moving world. These photographs are the atrophies of light. There is so much intimacy in static. The stillness of a moment, a body that will never change within its confines. And in preservation, photographs are not the moments we live through, but their distortions. And so, this light i stole: not taken from the people in these images, but rather taken from the world. Stolen away. Photography is an act of devotion to the beauty of form, to the worthwhileness of every iteration and incarnation, each momentary, vanishing flicker in the chain of history. It is an act of resistance against erasure, an emancipation of each body of light, freed from the obliteration of time if only for a moment. Stolen away in the light.
I have nothing of this living I can hold in my hands. And yet.
cathedraled youth. rubbled structures. made things gone to dust. the house of our aging, the novel which the body turns into, our thatched years, our ricketing lives, our memories.
