Close to extraordinary
Having a moment on the floor of an antiques store
At a place called the Antiques Barn in New Paltz, NY, this photograph hides in a wicker basket of discarded frames. I am a hunting dog scouring the pile. Images shuffle across my palms. Tarot. Then, this. I slouch above it, blood supply struggling its way through my legs. Something tugs in my stomach.
It’s April 30th, 2024. Our image outnumbers us, on and on. Our likeness is an ever-growing accordion tucked neatly into screens. The photograph—deliriously made, reproduced, and shared—seems fixed to life’s every aspect, until death, perhaps beyond it. Pictures are everywhere. Snapshots are not extraordinary. Until we find one that’s close to extraordinary, made a century ago and lost in a tide of novelties. (Despite the fact that I cannot see her eyes, her gaze fills the frame, and whether she knows it or not, with her stare eternally protected and mine exposed to her, she becomes seer and I become subject. Under her hat, she grins softly, and standing against a building that could be anywhere she steals a little dominance back from the camera. The longer I engage with this photograph, the more photographed I feel.) And that’s when the alchemy of images redeems itself, just when I think I’ve had enough, again and again, miraculous, spontaneous. Like new life itself.
Asked by Jordan Weitzman how to make a good portrait of someone, Elle Pérez plainly states: “You just love them.” I am trying to decide if the camera person loved the woman in this photograph. She stands tall and sly, a little off-center frame with only a roof and staircase in the background. Surely some emotion is at play here, and if not love, then what? Something peripheral. Curiosity, I decide. I then wonder if it’s possible to love a stranger.
Despite pictures being everywhere, it’s unlikely that the Antiques Barn sells many snapshots like these. I feel that’s the fleeting role photographs, physical or not, play in our immediate lives—most of us compulsively make them, but few of us carry their weight forever. I’m just the type to worship humble objects. And maybe, too, I hope a stranger picks me out of a wicker basket in a hundred years.
Meanwhile
Current read: Index Cards by Moyra Davey. Davey pulls you into the depths of her personal life to discuss dust, death, and motherhood; all while conjuring Sontag, Genet, Wollstonecraft, Akerman, and even Eileen Myles (!) to weave a referential tapestry of art and life. I’ll never not hear her warning about low-hanging fruit.
Current listen: Waving To My Girl by Winten
Current fixation: Driving to the next town over for a cup of coffee