One of the themes I have been exploring in my series Economic Entropy is the idea of whitewash. Whitewashing is a method often used by real estate brokers to erase the graphic history of a site or previous use of a commercial building by painting it over.
The day I shot this photo, I was waiting for friends Kipp Normand and Ray Raposa to arrive at a location for a press photo shoot for Ray (the same location where I coincidentally shot Thonet). I was parked on Hamilton Avenue in Indianapolis about a block from the location. As I stood staring at this fence, I realized that just a few blocks down on Hamilton was the site if the grizzly Hamilton Avenue mass murders of 2006, where seven people were senselessly killed. I was immediately tempted to go shoot the house, but as I looked at this half-painted fence, I saw a more poetic image: that of a partially whitewashed fence which seemed an impossible task to complete. The history of Hamilton Avenue could not be erased. And the fence was one of the most modest, genuine examples of economic entropy that I had encountered.
I received good news this week from the Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston (Winchester) MA. This photograph was selected for it's annual juried exhibition which runs July 8th through August 30th. Selected by Catherine Edelman, it looks like an interesting show with work by Colleen Plumb, Katrina d'Autremont, and Eve Morgenstern among others. Check it out if you're in Beantown.
2 comments:
I love your writing already.
yes, the fence is a 'hedge'.
it stands within the photograph
that stands, itself, as fence
- or 'hedge'. there is no gate,
but there are openings, where
something surely has escaped.
one certainly wonders about
the absence within the lot
protected by the fence;
underlined by the fence;
paralleled by the fence.
missing is usher and the house of usher. and yet, usher is present
in that weathered fragmentary
spoliation that is the aspect
of the fence being whitewashed, bleached, hidden...fenced.
i see the form of an analogy
is presented in this photograph.
one which does not stop, once it has been noticed, but reaches out into the diverse spaces of interpretation. the grass is revealed by the whitewash as a greater cover up. this lawn of grass counters the stretch of asphalt, that tells more of the neighborhood, than the grass would allow. and the photographic plane
is a piece of graffiti, a smudge,
a clump of driftwood, tacked upon the whitewash of the gallery wall in boston, itself now placed, via your narrative account, as a distant pleasure, one remove from this field of gray a margin, a street, a fence, a hedge. one wants a hot-air balloon to descend into the picture. One wants the victims of the 'grizzly' scene
to climb out of the balloon's great basket, wearing fresh white trousers, or boxers, or towels;
one wants them to pull from the balloon's basket a second smaller basket that holds within it a picnic, when unfolded on the lawn,
includes an odd collection: some pewter cups, some bone china plates, some white bread, some lump of ambiguous meat. and wine, of course, very old very delicious wine....
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