The Story Changes

Living with my art

I look back at my past work a lot. This is something that I have often viewed with suspicion and a fair bit of uncharitable judgement. I’m not looking back at past work as a document of bygone days, but rather to ask myself what this work means for me today.

In prior posts I talked about pausing and writing about artist statements about my work and about my desire to go back and do these little photo essays/haikus/poems from my past work. I’ve had a lot of mixed feelings about this desire due to the reasons I mentioned above and also out of a fear that looking back too much could keep me from moving forward. But I don’t think I need to worry about that.

In college I was lucky enough to be friends with the keepers of my university’s “photo archive”. One night I sat holding two prints of Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico made 10 years apart, both printed by the man himself. In that moment of satori, I knew that art could be a living thing.

Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was written, rewritten, edited, expanded, and contracted continually. Director’s Cuts and Album remasters have become routine and nearly expected. Kerouac’s On the Road, Hokusai’s The Great Wave, Cohen’s Hallelujah: time and again great art is invented and reinvented.

Oct. 2020 / May 2025

Death of an artwork

Photography is often presented as a “print” bound medium. A photographer runs off an edition of ~20 identical prints of a single image and calls the work done. In the last ten years I have never printed the same image the same way twice. I repost altered or modified images to instagram or my websites continually and I’ve often felt a twinge of guilt at violating the generally recognized “best practices” of a photographic artist.

For the last 3 years I’ve been internally threatening to begin printing single prints of my photos before destroying the files and negatives. The last decade I’ve worked in a library archive seeking to preserve music scholarship for future generations, but the entire time I felt a growing conflict. Most art, most human creation, isn’t meant to last.

Years ago I went to the National Gallery of Art to see Robert Frank’s The Americans. Paired with the original photographs was a display of derivative works. Artists who took the prints and set them of fire, drilled holes through them, or otherwise actively destroyed them. The irony of this is that upon inspection of the original silver gelatin prints I noticed the distinct signs of expired fixer having been used in the development of several prints. The originals were already being destroyed by time. Their destruction being accelerated by publicly displaying them and exposing them to light. What little I know about Robert Frank, I’m sure he would be pleased to know that someone caught this detail.