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somewhere over the rainbow (and other stories)

  Exactly two years ago I found myself flying through a corner of a rainbow, and landed in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was the last film festival I traveled to, a brutal and sweet experience in the harshest of realities, trying to wrap my arms around the slipperiest industry and failing magnificently. Surrounded by fresh faces and eager eyes I ran from the rooms and into the street time and again, wandering off with the camera in my bag as a companion. I took pictures of a blind man that sang on the same corner every day, of wedding parades, of an old woman waiting to see the dentist.  Literally somewhere over the rainbow, I met the ugliest answers to questions I had been dragging my feet towards for years. Cramming the most delicious food into my mouth, joking at the nightly rooftop cocktail parties, grinning like the Cheshire Cat it was all coming to an end. Actually, it had ended before it even started though - and on the plane back to New York and finally Moscow the bone-crunching undertow
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the myth of the expat


I used to think that an expat is someone that lives far from home. When they return, a world that they know all too well comes back in a flood of fresh, juicy detail. That is the expectation, the myth of the expat. The familiar food in their belly, the old smells, the language they spoke as a child. They come home from time to time or just all of the way back and  somehow things can go back to normal. It is a lovely idea, and I have held it tight in my pockets as I wander foreign streets.

Most people know that the old sneakers hanging over intersections are a form of a gravestone, a marker for someone that has passed. Someone that went away. I took a few pictures of these the last time I was in New York, with puffy clouds behind them and old bricks, red and sunny as any Hopper painting. As I have said a few million times, every portrait, every image is of the person taking it as much as the subject. And yes, I still fail to recognize what I have described in pictures like this. That failure, that clumsy, dirty mirror waits for me patiently to see what was there the entire time.

At one point, the expat cannot go home because that home has changed so much that it no longer exists. At the same time, where they live, where they fall asleep under foreign sheets is a temporary home, an extended rental. The expat wakes up a gypsy, without knowing it. Those sneakers hanging on wires are just waiting for them to admit it.
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