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 ...
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the price of freedom
New York, in 1937 filmed on Kodachrome by an unknown cameraperson. Here is a gentle gaze on the city, sharing the details of daily life for a certain privileged section of society. Plenty is missing from this odd document, the racism, segregation and poverty is invisible. It is a truly lopsided view, but the steam is still steam. The city lights still blink at night, in an odd and magic rhythm. This is a film made by a rich person, maybe a kind one. It is impossible to know. Nothing but the pictures can tell us what thought went into this rare document.
The servants, the hookers, the immigrants and the gangs are curiously missing, but here is the city, buildings reaching through tall shadows. Fog and smoke, concrete and asphalt, neon and some sense of possibility.
I took a picture on 5th Avenue over a year ago of steam and taxis, traffic and steel and glass. Why did I take it? This is my New York. A tiny little sliver. A half breath.
But there is a flag in this picture, draped in shadow. This is how I see the country. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are far in the background, an afterthought. The steam and the taxi are more important somehow. Pollution and commerce, or more simply put - our modern world.
But who will see this picture? A handful of followers, maybe someday in a book if I can find the means to publish it without costing an arm and a leg. Chances are, my image will live in obscurity. I accepted that reality a long time ago. As artists grow more and more into brands, and personalities, as their work fits neatly into categories, fueled by hashtags and cliques I just wander on my own. How many times did someone chime in, leaning into my ear to say "You know, it's very hard to get attention for work like this. It's just not very commercial." I always nodded. When I was younger, I thought that this made me something fancy like a maverick or a rebel. Now I just understand it is the only way I can work. I either create this way, or stop creating all together and open up that pasta place. The world always needs good pasta.
This odd film, this Kodachrome document - did the makers ever imagine it would be seen by 2 million people? I am sure they did not. Could this image of mine resurface in 90 years and mean something to people from generations that have yet to be born? Anything is possible. On the one hand, obscurity is the price of freedom- that choice to create outside of the commercial expectations, the genres, the tried-and-true. On the other hand, outsider art, primitive work, cave paintings and everything else somehow finds an audience by some crazy logic.
So yes, to steam and fedoras. Yes, to flags in shadows. Yes to whatever is significant to you, no matter how unpopular or obscure it may seem. Life is long. The work somehow survives, resurrected by strangers that have yet to be born. We make our own problems, and keep them healthy and alive, chewing at the backs of our heels, throwing shadows over our most original ideas.
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