Memory – Camera Obscura

May the Road Rise to Meet You, by Sara Macel

Sara Macel — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 02:10:43 +0000

In the Company Car in 1981, Spring, Texas
© Sara Macel
Please visit May the Road Rise to Meet You, by Sara Macel for the full size image.

Text and photos by Sara Macel.

For years, I traveled on road-trips throughout America taking photographs. Only recently did I make the connection between my desire for the road and the fact that my father, for the past forty years, has traveled these same routes as a telephone pole salesman. In the age of cell phones and data-reception towers, telephone poles, as both components and symbols of communication, are less vital than they once were. As my father is reaching the end of his career, the traveling salesman’s role in society is also entering its twilight.

My project, May the Road Rise to Meet You, explores the life of a businessman alone on the road. The initial goal was to create a visual narrative of the past 40 years of my father’s professional life, separate from our shared family structure and experience. My father is a man defined by his job and devoted to his family. Considering how much time he spends on the road, he was remarkably present during my childhood. Only occasionally did I really feel his absence, and as I got older, I became more and more curious about where he went when his car pulled out of the driveway. When he announced to the family that he plans to retire in a few years, I knew this could possibly be my only chance to get in that car with him.

House of Pies, Houston, Texas
© Sara Macel
Please visit May the Road Rise to Meet You, by Sara Macel for the full size image.

To tackle the enormous task of creating visual imagery to represent an entire life on the road, I approached this project from multiple angles. I re-traced my father’s steps by going back to places he visited and photographed places he may have passed along the way. Meanwhile, I traveled with my father and documented him on the road in present day. I also collected ephemera from his home office and created my own ephemera that represents or comments on my perception of the life of “the salesman.”

Motel Notes, Hampton Inn, St. Louis, Missouri
© Sara Macel
Please visit May the Road Rise to Meet You, by Sara Macel for the full size image.

Elements of fact and fiction play a significant part in both my image-making. By going to places my father may have visited in the past, I am attempting to put myself in his shoes. Some of the scenes I photographed are based on stories he has told me over the years and notes I found in his files; others are a mixture of my imagination and the portrayals of salesmen from movies and television. Since very little photographic evidence of my father’s work life exists, popularized images of traveling businessmen work to fill in the blanks in my imagination and memory.

By digitally altering some of my original medium-format photographs (as in “House of Pies, Houston, Texas”) to match the look and feel of old snapshots, I am imagining that this collection of snapshots belongs to my father and was taken on one of his trips away from home when I was a child. Combining actual ephemera (the motel notes he wrote to himself, for example) with fictionalized ephemera (my digitally-aged medium-format “snapshots”) is another way of retracing his steps and building a collection of tangible relics that represent his life away from home.

Boots, Seaford, New York
© Sara Macel
Please visit May the Road Rise to Meet You, by Sara Macel for the full size image.

As much as I am channeling the past through my father, I am also trailing the ghosts of earlier road-trip photographers. The genre of road-trip photography has been well-explored by Robert Frank, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld, Alec Soth, and Justine Kurland, so it has been a challenge to bring something new to the table. My favorite road photography projects were created by men and communicate a sense of freedom and male wandering. And even in Kurland’s This Train is Bound for Glory, the road sings its reckless siren song. I find the experience of being a woman alone on the road to be very different. When I travel, I feel a sense of freedom and desire to throw caution to the wind, but there is also an unmistakable fog of vulnerability. It is a fear that has, at times, held me back from getting the shot I want and left me wondering how or if the situation might differ were I a male photographer. This project allowed me to channel those desires by experiencing the road from my father’s perspective, and in doing so, combine the genres of road-trip and family photography.

7:00 AM, Denny’s Breakfast, Spring, Texas
© Sara Macel
Please visit May the Road Rise to Meet You, by Sara Macel for the full size image.

My dad has a motto for almost any situation. On one of our road-trips, when I asked him about dealing with customers, he told me: “There’s always that old saying that you don’t know someone until you walk a few miles in their moccasins.” When I started this project, I set out to rediscover my father as a man separate from his role in our family and explore the alternating sadness and freedom of a life spent alone on the open road. What I found in chasing this initially elusive male figure is that I can never fully know my father or what it is like to be a man alone on the road.

The Towering Figure, Huntsville, Texas
© Sara Macel
Please visit May the Road Rise to Meet You, by Sara Macel for the full size image.

The title of the project, May the Road Rise to Meet You, is an old Irish blessing often said in my family. I believe it resonates for us because my father is so often away from home traveling on the road alone. For years, there has been a ceramic plaque in my parents’ kitchen, just above the stove, that says: “May the road rise to meet you / May the wind be ever at your back / May the sun shine warm upon your face / And the rain fall softly on your fields / And until we meet again / May God hold you in the hollow of his hand.”

Me and Dad on the road, San Antonio, Texas
© Sara Macel
Please visit May the Road Rise to Meet You, by Sara Macel for the full size image.

In the end, this project became less about the American landscape or traveling salesmen or Robert Frank and more about distance: the emotional and physical distance between me and my dad, the vast expanses of land he travels to this day, and the memories of that brief little stretch of time when we got to travel together.

For more from Sara Macel, please follow her on twitter, facebook or tumblr.

Camera is my passport, by Joanna Ornowska

Joanna Ornowska — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:57:47 +0000

Text and photos by Joanna Ornowska.

It was all in my head. I was feeling tired but I carried on. I started to notice ordinary things, in everyday life, things that I appreciate, I see beauty in things which are imperfect. And I slowly started to pay off my debt to people that I love. I think that there’s more serenity in everything that I do. It’s not that I don’t care or lost my ambitions, I just believe more. I’ve got two hands, two legs, I can breath, I can hear, I can see. It’s amazing.

This is the last paragraph from the text that I wrote for my personal project describing my year-long recovery from Hepatitis C. It was a difficult time. I was giving myself injections and taking pills throughout the following 48 weeks. When I started to feel weak, I was thinking that maybe it’s normal, maybe it’s caused by something else… Even though it was often hard to force myself to get out of bed, I was trying to live the normal life. But over a period of time it slowed me down. There were times when I wished I stopped the therapy. I was exhausted, my head, my muscles, my bones were sore. When I couldn’t get over it, I was going straight to bed and was waiting for the hours to pass. It was hard to wake up and hard to fall asleep. I had no energy that I used to have, any physical work was exhausting. Things I was able to do before without any effort, now started to become impossible, it was frustrating. I’ve lost almost 10 kilos, I was loosing hair, I felt a bit as if I was vanishing. I know that it was very hard for people around me to deal with it. I was trying not to show as much pain as I really felt. I did get used to it. But being happy was very hard sometimes…

At first I didn’t think of photographing anything at that time. I took a gap year at university, I needed a rest. But I also felt a strong need to give the answer to what was happening inside and around me. I convinced myself to pick up my camera again; in fact this was the moment when I really started to appreciate photography. And I photographed everything that surrounded me. I know now that it was an attempt to explain how the treatment overtook my life and lives of people that I love. I didn’t see it at the time, but those photographs hide something that allowed me to get to the end of the therapy, something that made me see things in a different way, something that helped me to wake up and see what really matters. People, family, close relationships, joy of being together, memories. My photographs are personal, but also anonymous and distant and I realized they can be part of history for each and any one of us. After that I became more curious about the role of photography in documenting and creating our identity. I was interested in how it influences our perception of world and memory. It inspired me to start another project. The camera is my passport to negotiate the meeting. Photography has become my language, unfettered by the grammar of the written word. Beauty has become the currency of my stories, through the simple and transparent sharing of a moment.

My current project is about memory and forgetting. I got in touch with people suffering from memory degenerative diseases. Their world is often filled with confusion. They gradually lose contact with themselves, their loved ones, and their personal and social location. Simple activities become difficult or impossible. They forget. People with Alzheimer’s are often stereotypically depicted as completely lost to us and themselves. The symptoms of degenerative brain diseases are real, but people who suffer from Alzheimer’s are not empty shells. Love and understanding is important to enable them to stay in the moment. Those stricken with dementia deserve more than just sorrow and confusion.

As I explore the subjects of memory and identity my photographs are the history of these meetings, their stories bear witness to an identity traced and recorded through the familiar detritus of our existence. Photographs from this project are glimpses into the life of a vulnerable person with a degenerative illness, and each glimpse is a moment lost in time. When words and thoughts fail, as in the case of Alzheimer’s disease, the symbolic language of art can tell a story, express an emotion or recreate a memory that may otherwise be left untold. I believe that simplicity of my images allows for an expression of human intimacy without overt exhibitionism or exploitation. I just wish that people who see my work would trust their feelings and then the programmed and literary approach and response could disappear from photography and its interpretation.

We are sensitive to beauty. The beauty in art, beauty of nature, the beauty in another person. A man, engaging with its simplicity, eye gaze, friendly gesture, warm word – the beauty not so much external as internal: attracting with a good heart. The pleasing view of a child full of joy chasing a ball, touching image of the father leading his son by the hand, unforgettable eyes of elderly lady with kindness and gratitude looking at the person who came to visit…

I started to photograph Dorothy in February 2011. Her rich life and precious memories became my inspiration. Born in Pontefract, in 1933, she is the youngest of a large family. Some people called her Little Dolly Daydream, but she was a lot more sensitive and deep thinking than anyone gave her credit for. Her dad, who was a coal miner, died when she was a baby. When she was 5 the whole family moved to Birmingham, where she continued her education. Although she got the place at Art College, she chose to go with her best friend to Derbyshire in order to become a teacher. She met Don when she was 16 and married him in 1955 on New Year’s Eve. Together with their children, they were helping and supporting each other throughout many years. After the initial devastation of losing Don in 2008, she rebuilt her life as a widow. She lives now on her own in a small bungalow in Rugby. She is a most talented and capable woman, her mind is filled with knowledge and experience. Dorothy was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. What will happen to that talent, to that mind? Where will be the memory of that life?

When asked about Alzheimer’s, Dorothy says that it’s like hanging a lead weight around your neck. People are kind, they don’t mean to be unkind, but they don’t realize how painful it is for the person with Alzheimer’s to have that label attached. Doctors talk to your carer, as if you’re an object or a child before talking period. That protective silence is painful and can send a lot of people deep into a shell. ‘I find it hard to visualize the future.’ – she says – ‘I hope it doesn’t get worse. But then that would come to stage when I wouldn’t realize that I’ve got something worth remembering anyway. I don’t know. I hope it doesn’t get any worse, it’s a horrible thought.’

Please visit Joanna Ornowska for more photographs and story.

Artist Dialogue, by Brendan George Ko

Brendan George Ko — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:09:42 +0000

December 5th, Numb, from Nocturne, 2009 – 2010
© Brendan George Ko
Please visit Artist Dialogue, by Brendan George Ko for the full size image.

Text and photographs by Brendan George Ko.

Before me lies an endless amount of possibilities, and behind me lies an endless amount of paths I have taken. I know I’m still pretty young, and I know I like to wonder in places people twice my age seem to contemplate in, but at times I feel like I am at the center of a series of wires, maybe threads, that are strung high and strike a key with each step.

In the shower a couple of months ago I realized something about remembering. I realized what all of these detached feelings I’ve been are; walking down the street, a shade of blue and a pile of leaves resonate a certain feeling, or right now as I sit in my apartment listening to the hum of the city being squeezed through the small opening of my window, there’s a feeling that is detached from a memory. Sure I can investigate further into its origins but I have realized something; that these feelings are not just associated with one memory but are reoccurring, making them independent. In memory there are two parts, one is a feeling, and the other is the skeleton of memory; sketched by portion, scale, sequence, time, space, and other specific details.

Monument, from Untitled Series, 2009 - 2010
© Brendan George Ko
Please visit Artist Dialogue, by Brendan George Ko for the full size image.

With my work, from my photographic practice, installation work, to my writing, I am constantly investigating fragments of my own history. The word history is a powerful thing that is endless; existing before and after you, me, and everyone alive today. Recently I have been fixed on notions of the extended memory. I have an obsession with floral pattern, but not just any pattern, ones similar to my mother’s, my aunt’s, and other people that I grew up around. I can’t explain why a particular pattern is so significant and others aren’t. Or why the origins of those 1960s floral patterns remind me of my own childhood. To others these interests would be seen as the vintage, to me it is nostalgic, and though their age is beyond my own, they are embedded into my childhood, they feel permanent in a world where the things I buy are meant to break, and to be replaced. I made this silly word for that feeling of a longing for the vintage, and things beyond our own time, disconnected feelings of nostalgia, I call it, Nowtalgic.

God, I’m Lonely (again), from Reminiscence, 2008 – 2010
© Brendan George Ko
Please visit Artist Dialogue, by Brendan George Ko for the full size image.

I remember watching a program on Sophie Calle, and she said that humor is hard to put into work and how importance it is. I’m often afraid my work, and my personality come off as too serious sometimes. I’m not a very serious person, I work hard, but I’m a really silly, absurd, and ridiculous person. I don’t think my photographic work is there yet, and perhaps that’s why my writing is almost separate from my other practices. In writing I can be as absurd and as ridiculous as I want because I think it is the most honest thing I am capable of doing as self-expressionist. Honesty is the most important thing because it comes from the heart. I often wondered why my best writing is ridiculous and absurd. I think life is ridiculous, life is silly, and life is crazier than my own imagination. (I’ve been segueing for a bit now but I’ll return soon enough).

October 5th, Lone, from Nocturne, 2009 – 2010
© Brendan George Ko
Please visit Artist Dialogue, by Brendan George Ko for the full size image.

There are different parts in life that make no sense, that still throw me through wonder, and escalate my interest in the possibilities. I grew up in the deserts of New Mexico thinking there are aliens abducting people, that there are giant shape-shifting werewolves out in the bushes waiting to steal my soul, and that there is a ghost living in my bedroom. To ask me now, as an adult if I still believe in all of that. I still do. It is a part of me, as much as science has taught me, and how I have learned of how this world works, there are still things left uncertain, unexplained, and completely irrational. I remember a piercing sound of a mechanic-textured vocal cord as struggle to speak or breathe in the corner of my childhood room. Once in a while I can still hear that exact sound reoccur in my memory, covering me with goose pimples. I learned before I left that house that there had been a woman who had died in that house a few years before the previous owners; she died during the same time of the year as those reoccurring phantasms, and that her body was discovered in my room. I don’t ever question my irrationality or my sanity when it comes to the supernatural. There are things in this world that can’t be explained. For my thesis work, I attempted at capturing an atmosphere of the strange and supernatural. I spent most of the school year out in the wild, from first light to midnight, from building shelters to seeing how the forest feels against bare flesh. I wanted the power of the woods to intoxicate me, to give me that familiar feeling that where I lie and wait is a place that is beyond me, in scale, in age, and in mystery. Though I have been doing landscape on the side for a while, it wasn’t until my thesis I created a conceptual landscape body of work.

November 25th, Sphere, from Nocturne, 2009 – 2010
© Brendan George Ko
Please visit Artist Dialogue, by Brendan George Ko for the full size image.

Recently I’ve been taking steps in a new direction, and it seems to be common in my artist practice to change directions, from going from film to photo, text-base work to landscape, and now to narrative still-life with my recent untitled work. I’ve been fascinated with the “new school” work coming from NYC and Europe, finding it refreshing and thrilling, and seeing the potential of contemporary art in photography.

Holy Mountain, from Untitled Series, 2010
© Brendan George Ko
Please visit Artist Dialogue, by Brendan George Ko for the full size image.

Since I finished my thesis, I’ve been contemplating on where my career goes from here; I’ve been a student for six years, and in the institution, surrounded by artists, for that entire time. I was pushed to produced, and influenced by so many, now that I am free of that, where do I go from there. I left my hands decide that, as I open to the possibilities, through risk, failure, and hopefully some success. All I can say is that I’m excited to see where I am in a year from now.

For more photographs please visit Brendan George Ko website and blog.

I’m Not There Yet (Jorge’s Last Words), from Reminiscence, 2008 – 2010
© Brendan George Ko
Please visit Artist Dialogue, by Brendan George Ko for the full size image.