Teju Cole's "Object Lesson"

Glenna Gordon, The Blouse of Hauwa Mutah, one of nearly 300 girls who were kidnapped from a school in Chibok, Nigeria last April by Boko Haram

Teju Cole, along with Rebecca Solnit, are two of the foremost writers on photography (and surprise, my favorite authors writing today). It was with great excitement that I saw a link to Cole's new essay "Object Lesson" in The New York Times Magazine late last week. Cole references images of conflict (recent depictions of demonstrations in Kiev or the Nigerian girls abducted by Boko Haram) yet it is not the political unrest, clashes with the riot police or the human victims that he deconstructs, but photographic projects devoid of people.

This passage resonates with me despite the original references to photojournalism and the subjects mentioned above. So much of why I photograph objects, rather than people, can be found in Cole's words below:

"Objects, sometimes more powerfully than faces, remind us of what was and no longer is; stillness, in photography, can be more affecting than action. This is in part because of the respectful distance that a photograph of objects can create between the one who looks, far from the place of trouble, and the one whose trouble those objects signify. But it is also because objects are reservoirs of specific personal experience, filled with the hours of some person’s life. They have been touched, or worn through use. They have frayed, or been placed just so."

Rebecca Solnit's "The Faraway Nearby"

That which I did not think possible: Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby has booted my previous favorite by the same author: A Field Guide to Getting Lost. What could be more perfect than reading a chapter each day for two weeks about storytelling while creating artwork about a narrative as seen through water? I could quote passages from 3/4 of the book but will not. There is one concept that Solnit mentions in the beginning and the end; it struck me to such a degree, that I tried to photograph it.

"Where does a story begin? The fiction is that they do, and end, rather than the stuff of a story is just a cup of water scooped from the sea and poured back into it."

"We never tell the story whole because a life isn't a story; it's a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit where and who we are."

Redfish Lake, Idaho, 2014

It was easy to relate this to an autobiography of water as I have spent the month collecting slivers and shards that belong to the past and the present. I knew I wanted to photograph Surel's old paint jar the second evening I saw it above the sink. It was the color of the water of the Middle Fork of the Boise River, the Payette, and Redfish Lake. Pouring is a welcome addition to holding a glass for all to see. The intent was not a literal interpretation but rather thinking about this image falling into the middle of the story, not knowing how it will end. Here the color is an illusion, not matching the background, but giving the impression that it belongs in this space. Is the story lost or has it been told? Is it silenced or is it set free?

Cinque Terre: Le Fin

Some final thoughts on Cinque Terre:

As we neared Liguria on the train, one section of the mountains looked like it was covered in snow. The elevation was far too low for that and I deduced it had to be removed by rock quarry equipment since we passed so many stone facilities right next to the railroad tracks. It was a little cloudy which added to the mystery of wondering what on earth I was seeing.


Ed Burtynsky, Carrara Marble Quarries

I later looked up the mountain range on my phone and discovered that I saw Carrara. My main point of reference is Ed Burtynsky photographs and suddenly it all began to make sense. I would see it from the airplane as I left Italy as well.

I saw a lemon so deformed it looked like it had eight legs like a carrot (not here but it's a good example of why Cinque Terre is known for it's lemon trees):



Cinque Terre where you can definitely tell the locals apart from the tourists. The former are elderly, stare at you through the windows of their prominently located apartments on the square, and huddle in groups in the alleyways talking about "Americanos."

I loved listening to the sounds of the restaurants and people walking in the streets from the balcony of my hotel room. I don't know if I want to come back here per se, but it makes me want to visit other parts of the Riviera in Spain and France in the off-season.

The church bells sound so rinky-dink compared to Venice or Florence. It is as if someone's in their backyard hitting a big bell with a stick. I had to listen to my sound recording at the Campanile in Venice just to compare and it is more majestic and mournful than the bells in Monterossa.



Rebecca Solnitt's "Blue of Distance" came to mind frequently (it reentered my consciousness in the Uffizi seeing how many Renaissance artists used the blue backgrounds to denote vast spaces). The "blue of distance" has a sense of longing attached to it. Since coming to Liguria, I'd like to think that I'm in that blue and it's not so distant anymore. I am engulfed by it. I don't long for it. It is everywhere and I am in it.



"The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost."
- Rebecca Solnit

The Road

Robert Frank, Still from Me and My Brother, 1965-1968

Although Cormac McCarthy's The Road is one of my favorite novels, that is not what this post is about. It's that time of year again where I have finished another Rebecca Solnit book and feel inspired enough to share a passage and the photographs it made me think of while reading it.


Todd Hido, #3277, 1994-2004

This is from the last chapter in Savage Dreams: "Of all the cardinal sins against the environment, driving long distance is the most seductive, the one that brings us back to otherwise inaccessible places, whatever the terms. I love long drives alone. The road is a place itself, or a border between places, a long narrow country without citizens whose only inhabitants are transients and strangers, a great suspended interval of privacy and peace between departure and arrival. And the road is a net dropped over the vastness of the continent, tying together all its distances into one navigable labyrinth of asphalt..."


Len Jenshel, Great Basin National Park, Nevada, 1987

"...Roads are the architecture of our restlessness, of those who wish neither to stay in their built places nor wander in the untouched ones, but to keep moving between them. A road promises something else to us, though the promise is better fulfilled by travelling than by arriving..."


Florian Maier-Aichen, Chamonix-Rue Nationale et le Mont Blanc, 2007

"...A road is itself a kind of sentence, or a story. A real place, it's also a metaphor for time, for future becoming present and then past, for passage. A road that travels over hills is a long sequence of geometrical variations that describes the landscape as it runs through, of s- and c-curves, rises and dips, bends, disappearances, distant reemergings, of a perpetual serpentine writhing in response to the contours that came before."


Danny Lyon, 1962

"In our heads and on maps, a road is a line drawn through the landscape, but from the road itself its foreground appears as a kind of V eternally opening up to wrap around us as we plunge onward, a great crawling king snake devouring us into the world beyond." RS


Richard Misrach, Tracks, Black Rock Desert, NV 1987

After a five hour drive on a windy, narrow road alongside sheer cliffs back to the provincial capital, a seasick inducing ferry ride over the Strait of Juan de Fuca, an hour and a half in the car to stop along a closed bridge near midnight waiting for the maintenance repairs to subside, another ferry across the Puget Sound/Salish Sea, ten hours looking at the roads below from the air above (and a forest fire in Eastern Oregon), and an hour and a half drive in the dark hoping the deer I didn't see on Vancouver Island would stay away from the road that night... I am at the place where my cats live (and they are happy to see me).


Vik Muniz, Historical Photo, 1989

Vancouver Island was my summer vacation - a place without stress, my I-phone, pollution, tons of people, and unfortunately visible wildlife. After I finish these treks across the Lower 48, Alaska and the rest of Canada are calling. It really is time I make my own earthwork.


Stephen Shore, Presidio, Texas, 1975

The next Solnit book on the horizon is Wanderlust: A History of Walking because (believe it or not), this blog will return to earthworks and walking will play a large role.