An android, a replicant to be exact, uttered his final words in the rain. Then he died. Before that moment, he delivered a powerful monologue recounting remarkable memories, memories that would soon be lost in time...like tears in the rain. Decades after first viewing this film, I can picture
the scene from the 1982 film Bladerunner, without much effort. Later, years later, I realized my viewing of that cinematic reincarnation of loss...of the profound and tragic awareness of an inevitable loss...roused an irrational fascination with nostalgia. Some of us, those afflicted with an irredeemable and recurring sense of longing learned to repress, ignore, deny, or cope with this sentiment. Others learned to ventilate their vapors through more artistic performances...writing, painting, sculpting, dance.
I had redirected my wistfulness. My circumnavigations led me through graduate school, dark continents, ancient ruins, spectacle, ritual, pyramids, anthropophagies, sacrifice...other peoples' memories of otherness, ethnographies, and other post-colonial laments...other attempts to preserve memories in time, before they were lost, like tears in the rain, or a tourist in a marketplace, a whirling dervish in his own centripetal motion, or a parchment in a desert cave. In the end, traveling through the terrain of anthropology, taught me how to see, and somewhere along the journey I also lost interest in the discipline's nostalgia for authenticity, abstraction and itself. I finished that journey, and began a life as an ethnographer in exile.
Anthropology's most ceremonious accomplishment...the substance that draws collegiate neophytes into those first-year university courses, is the demystification of the exotic,
the translation of the extraordinary into the ordinary. The discipline thrives on unraveling layers of behavior, and custom, and in the end revels in revelations of resonance and similarity. I traveled and wrote, and documented. But,
I was interested in transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. All along I had been pining against the grain, and I didn't even know it.
A decade and a year into my exile, my wife was diagnosed with cancer. It was her second journey through the metastatic labyrinth, and in order to negotiate this repetition I decided to photograph,
blog, document and rant my way through it. I wanted to render extraordinary the banality of lab tests, diagnosis, surgeries, chemotherapy, exhaustion, and fear.
I fell under the spell, and photography soon became my occultist passion, learning how to hide the mundane in images exorcised from the everyday. And before you smirk, let me assure you that I'm not so naive as to believe or pretend to believe that photographic images render a more viable, transparent, moral or sanitized reality. However, I am optimistic that framing a moment, capturing an emotion, domesticating color and scale, light and perspective, can push away those moments of death where experience and memory are lost like tears in the rain.
If you share, or merely sympathize with my delusions, I invite you to return and record your own impressions, as I photograph, comment, and explore the borders between things.
