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December, 2020
Early in the pandemic, while combing through old files, I stumbled upon a portrait session from years past. I found myself transfixed by the final image from the day: a haphazard shot of the room after its subject stepped from view. The absence felt heavy, visceral. The weight of the light in that space, on that point— the wrinkle in the fabric, where a body had been. A latent image realized, years later, as a relic of human presence.
In quarantine, when I finally began leaving my home to photograph, there seemed always to be something between my body & where I was looking. A sunshield in Ventura masked the planted rows that stretched beyond. A young sapling, sprinkled in fertilizing powder, swayed on the opposite side of a chain link fence. Separation compounded itself over and over.
In the spring, a statue of David had fallen in the cemetery next to my studio— an unfortunate consequence of weak ankles, true to Michelangelo’s original. Throughout the course of its life, the Carrera Marble replica has fallen three times: during the 1971 Sylmar Earthquake, the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, & on March 8th of 2020. There was no earthquake.
Regard the myth of David & it is hard to refrain from spinning grim omens from synchronicity— the Goliath-killer toppling in the precise week of the city’s first lockdown, leaving fractured marble strewn across the cemetery hill. Loneliness, a favorite theme of epics, has shaded the past year, alongside a vigilance, necessary when one is simultaneously threatening and threatened by every stranger, friend, & lover.
Spending evenings sifting through overlooked photographs, I was first pulled towards grainy exposures of horses, taken in the final weeks before the onset of early restrictions. With a symbolism ranging from rescue to apocalypse, the horse’s allegorical meaning is often assigned for the motives of its rider, whose commands the animal enacts. And with trust a pressing question, in the thick of a plague, who can tell a hero from a horseman.
The Horse and Rider, Louise Glück
Once there was a horse, and on the horse there was a rider. How handsome they looked in the autumn sunlight, approaching a strange city! People thronged the streets or called from the high windows. Old women sat among flowerpots. But when you looked about for another horse or another rider, you looked in vain. My friend, said the animal, why not abandon me? Alone, you can find your way here. But to abandon you, said the other, would be to leave a part of myself behind, and how can I do that when I do not know which part you are?