I call this body of work “A Gathering of Witnessed Events” for
several reasons. They aren’t events in the same vein as the
Democratic National Convention or an NHL game, but in the same
logic, the photographs are secondary experiences that allow me to
be in the audience of a portrayed scene that I’d physically been in
once before. On a firsthand and secondary level, the events are
witnessed. Firsthand they are witnessed by myself holding the
camera, and secondarily they’re viewed via the final product (my
print). The prints are hung naked allowing the word “Gathering” to
adopt an informal connotation, thus encouraging a sense of intimacy
between the audience and the work.
The fact that most of this work was created within the City of
New York is incidental as I reside in Flushing, NY. Since my local
train stop is 71st Ave., I became quite fond of the F-Train and it
became my favored mode of transportation (though I must credit the
L-Train and the 4-Train as well). This body of work was created
mainly on Sunday afternoons between mid-January and March
2008.
Getting off the train at any given point I would wander by foot
throughout parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan (once I wound up at the
mouth of a sprawling cemetery [sprawling to my judgment, fairly
standard in New York] in Jackson Heights via Brooklyn). I always
went out by myself and didn’t see many people, just the lifeless
remnants of human ingenuity. It didn’t feel right to be amidst all
of this latent activity with no one around - I experienced the
disturbing calmness of anticipation, of standing amongst
ghosts.
The anticipation would continue to swell as I enveloped myself
further and further, engulfed within my journey. Yet the
anticipation never amounted to anything; everything remained inert.
The anticipation was of finding some sort of answer to a question
that I couldn’t articulate and I wasn’t sure I was asking; I just
knew that I had to find some sort of answer. After a few hours of
searching I would be left with several hundred images (that were
now memories) while possessing the unmistakable feeling that I
could fall off the face of the earth and nothing would happen –
that I had become a ghost myself.
I’ve always thought there to be truth in the old line about
photography that says something like, “Great photography is a
reflection of the photographer.” I don’t believe that any
photographer necessarily tries to produce himself in his or her
work purposely, but true objectivity is something that is nearly
(if not entirely) impossible. The relationship between myself and
the city I inhabited became autobiographic of the both us, both
physically and metaphysically. The intensity of my personal
experience got to the point where I had to stop and step away from
my work for a while.
I cannot help but wonder whether or not the city is just a place
where a bunch of people live, or if the city itself is alive. If
it’s the latter, the city will chew us up and spit us out. But if
it’s just a place to live then that’s all it is.