The First from Peru

Puno, Peru, 2010

Beginning of the End

Tonight, learning for the first time that my best friend is adamant concerning the idea of leaving New York finally (and presumably for good), fills me with a good deal of fear--both righteously acquired, and subliminally brought. On the one hand, I see myself as the one last man standing, successful and triumphant, and on the other, I see myself as the sucker, the imbecile: maybe I don't get it. Through the years, good and bad, I have witnessed many turns of fate and faith (there must be a reason for everything!); and in perpetrating that role, my own sense of self has developed, contracted, and become a querulous skeleton of its original state. I only always wish to hope the very best for my friends, but there is an innate and insidious jealousy that compounds and compromises my fear: am I afraid of their failure or mine? And what defines failure to begin with?

God bless our sojourns, and whatever we decide, i hope to hell that the kind of improbable sunshine that we have all experienced continues to reign down upon us. Let's continue to prove them all wrong. God bless Purdy, and God bless everyone i have known that has contributed to my life. Here's how it is, and here's to you...

Eternal Return

At first glance, the notion of "eternal return" can seem like a simple paradoxical idea like the Fibonacci sequence or other rules of half: the notion of unending continuation are--though mostly impracticable in a day-to-day sense--plausible. But taking Nietzche's existential definition of a continuous return to every passing moment, thereby making those very moments palpable and intransient, complicates and cerebralizes a simple notion. So why do this? And why should we care to? Possibly the mere consideration of such a notion develops and monumentalizes simplistic ideas concerning how we live our lives, and create within them. He explains it thusly:

What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your loneliest solitude and said to you: "This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to life again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence...The eternal hourgalss of existence will be turned again and again--and you with it, you dust grain of dust!"  

The thought of eternal return, Nietzsche tells us, is one that can transform us, one that may well crush us: what if we are as we now are and do as we now do not once but rather once more, and not, by far, for the last time? To be sure, this could be a terrifying prospect: to not only repeat every action in one's own life, but to know it as a repetition and be cursed to know it will be eternally so. 

I certainly believe that such an exercise in existential thought intends not to crush, but enliven the spirit; to exalt the senses and inspire one to live a life of beauty in which no second is wasted and no regrets are to be had. Of course this is impossible, but to try is not. 

The above photograph represents for me an understanding of this notion; it is a place I have returned to photograph several times for the same intuitive but unknown reason. Reflective infinity abounds in either direction, both equally and impossibly unreachable. For that reason, and like the notion of "eternal return," i feel they represent the crushing hopelessness of one's own inabilities, but also, the wondrous ad infinitum of the cosmically possible. 

"Frustration can be gorgeous/Sometimes gorgeous can be frustration"

-Braid

And They Think This Doesn't Happen

©Tyler Campbell Wriston, 2009

“They were a society of indigents subsisting without heat, lights, or water. They were nuclear families with toys and pets, junkies who roamed at night in dead men’s Reeboks…They were foragers and gatherers, can-redeemers, the people who yawed through subway cars with paper cups. And doxies sunning on the roof in clement weather and men with warrants outstanding for reckless endangerment and depraved indifference. And there were shouters of the Spirit….a band of charismatics who leapt and wept on the top floor, treating knife wounds with prayer.”

-Don DeLillo

Things I Lost in The Fire

©Tyler Campbell Wriston, 2009

" All Photographs are, at some level, about love, and all photographs are triggered, to varying degrees, by desire. These human emotions may be well-disguised, or expressed indirectly, but they are always there: either the person behind the camera wishes to seize and possess a moment, a mood, an, object, a body, a place, a face; or the person in front of the lens asks, and often pays to have a picture taken. Whoever instigates the event may wish to impress others, or honour them with a love token, or excite them sexually. Or they may simply want to preserve something for posterity. Whatever the intent, overt or covert, there is no denying the staggering volume of images produced in a mere one-hundred and sixty years . In the aggregate, in their billions, the photographs of this world comprise a massive archive--testifying to the depth and immutability of human longings, lusts, and affections"

--William A. Ewing

In photographing one's own personal loss, there is an inherent question of purpose. The object itself represents a kind of longing to impress or commemorate, though perhaps in a way that attempts to establish something closer to truth: something that when seen through the veil of the artist's own complicated experience with that loss, will transcend objectivity and strike a chord in the very depths of any who view it. To be sure, this impulsion is voyeuristic in some ways: to pedestalize one's own suffering for not but sympathy, only more like something closer to a longing for kinship in suffering--for empathy rather than tawdry pity. It is not yet some subterfuge, but for me, a process of both remembering and forgetting. In capturing the physical remains of a loss, one can look back through the lens of a time long in the past, where remembering is more beautiful than the immediacy of the original experience. It is a way of deciphering pain in a specific and paramount way, perhaps to own it for the first time instead of being owned by it.

I can still smell the musk of the housefire. Not a clean, burnt pine odor, but one in which the chemical stain of plastics and polymers commingle with the air of lost belongings and the frustration of forceful adaptation. I can still remember where the soot of the fire silhouetted my pet cat on the hardwood floor, and the sound the box I buried her in made when I covered it loosely with dirt beneath a tree in the neighboring garden. The sound of breaking glass and ripping drywall rings in my ears from that night as we raged at our ruined home, cursing our luck and tearing our knuckles for want and refusal of hopeless restitution. In the end, the experience made me a stronger, more self reliant person; I am just not yet sure that talking about it has now or ever will.

There Is a Light and It Never Goes Out...

©Tyler Campbell Wriston, 2009

Finding new inspiration in what has currently come to be a dearth of clarity and creative sustainability has been--to say the least--foreboding. Having a newly acquired temporary employment status that allows me some kind of re-connect with the photography world and the youthful exuberance therein, has been refreshing, but disturbing in its transience. The freedom I have allowed myself to work through much of my unending pile of negative pages has opened up a hopefulness in revisiting these moments captured so carefully on celluloid; but as much as they act as a window into the effortless past, they also enact a sense of unabating disunity with my current state of tumultuous self-doubt and back-beating.

Scene: Intersection of US 135 and US 50, just outside the city limits of Salina, Kansas. It's 2 am and the idling engines of ten or more semi trucks fill the air above their exhaust valves with diesel fumes and freon gas. The slapping tires of a Grand Am peel away on the highway by the rest stop as I sit, letting small tendrils of smoke drift through my nostrils; I'm half awake. With the wood slats and wrought-iron of New Orleans behind me and the mountainous outstretch of Ft. Collins in front of me, I wait for the shutter click and contemplate the perfect light of a lone bulb, burning away into the vesper and tepid haze of a Kansas past midnight by the roadside.

Now, years later, and in the face of economic recession, rising interest rates, broken down equipment, and the perpetual dull hum of an endless race for the next unfulfilling part-time or temporary job, the exhausting exhiliaration of road-freedom seems like an unfathomable ghost. And I am a terrible medium. Here's, though, to the future anyway. Here's to the ghosts of the past revisiting us if only to drag their chains and moan us into restless sleep. They may be more than reminders of what we have not now, but once had before.

BITK

So I'll start my first post with a farewell to one of my longtime friends and associates, Carlos Valpeoz. Below is a video of the last ever Team Robespierre performance at a Bikes in the Kitchen show. Running for almost four years on a shoe-string budget and a liquid-and-powder diet, BITK pissed a lot of people off, but also changed the face of the Brooklyn music scene for years to come, if not forever.

I will always remember where it started, in the cramped two-bedroom on Ryerson Street, shoulder to shoulder, walls sweating with perspiration and the air almost incendiary with excitement and something that escapes words. two apartments, two floors, anda roof later, BITK moved out of the basement and into the public sphere.

It always kind of felt like a secret society, a club that we on the ground floor belonged to and shared together. It felt no different on the last night--head next to the speaker--as I wrapped my arms around those few dear friends that were there in the beginning, and finally, there in the end. RIP BITK, Carlos, seeya at SXSW.