“A Chronicle of Love & Loss in Sickness & in Health” A portrait subject, a musician, recently questioned the meaning behind the title of my present Polaroid series, and I found myself uncharacteristically grasping for a semblance of relatable articulation. It was maybe the first time since the series origin that I’d felt a genuine sense of vulnerability in regard to defining it’s contextual idioms, and clear literal identity alike.
An hour later we walked toward the subway, summing up the conversation had while shooting, topics ranging from the reverberating genealogical echoes of the long deceased, to the convergence of visual art and music during the creative process. In addressing his prior question what I’d imagined I’d say: “My aim was for the title to encompass the visceral sense of grandeur touched in the last four- plus years, as another individual examining New York City itself as having the potential for animate, intimate dialogue with the ably receptive spirit, yet simultaneously feeding the power of the more dominant of each individuals innately opposing internal forces.
Those forces being interminably beyond the realm of the human conditions most cliché definitions of good & evil. I’d hoped to dismantle the edifice of human complexity through the simplicity of taking photographs with instant film. I wanted the title to iterate the poignancy of my personal epiphanies in the interim between youth & young- adulthood, to surmise every possible intent, deliberation with denial of action, spontaneous and methodical malintent propelling my story.
At times outside my skin just enough to witness the subtle physical nuances of aging, yet inside myself just enough to sense a gradual rebirth through evolutionary maturation” Instead what I did say “Mine as well as any one life can be defined by four basic ideas: Love, loss, sickness & health, and each of those ideas rendered me hopeful or helpless of will for a given time in the conception and actualization of this past years body of work”
We hugged goodbye, in that embrace was an unspoken evidence that the day’s documentation, a quiet sequence of still frames effected only by a cascading light through the window of a time-worn Bedstuy apartment building, had enabled the composition of a symphonic note of visually unbound proportions, exposing essential fragments of the arch of both our apologues.
Ever so seldom a moment will take us to a logically unfathomable state of grace, the popular term for this being transcendence. In those moments that we irrationally allude skepticism, embracing that ethereal state of being, we realize that all our lives, the wholes of our existence are these non-linear, infinitely- promising and still tragically- solitary, cinematic masterpieces.
In the case of mine and my subject’s collective experience, with our internal compass as guide, each other’s limbs as occasional, albeit undeniably fragile anchors, we travel streets to the pulse of the insomnia driven heart-beat of where circumstance and circumnavigation has led us all, New York City: Our troubled confidant, our commiserating commissary…Our beautifully, inescapable backdrop.
links:
http://www.pasunautre.com/2011/09/15/interview-devin-elijah-a-chronicle-of-love-loss/
devinelijah.com
http://www.blurb.com/books/2578288
http://www.lapetitemortgallery.com/devin-elijah/
http://www.facebook.com/devinelijahphotography
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