Book & Gravure print (edition of 12 + 3 a.p.)

36pp; 6.37 x 9.75" // hand-bound pamphlet stitch artist book with tipped in images, printed on Awagami Inbe (125gsm) with Cone Edition Piezography Pro Ink & Moab varnish

Each book comes with an 6x9” photogravure print featuring an image not found in the book made on 7/31/22, the first anniversary of my father’s passing.

(gravure images forthcoming)

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On July 31, 2021 my father passed away from complications of breakthrough Covid. It was early days of Omicron, and he was 10 days or so into it, seemingly recovering, when his heart stopped. We had messaged or spoken a few days prior. His death was not expected.

We weren’t exactly close, but we weren’t estranged anymore either. Someone told me it can be harder to lose someone with whom you had a difficult relationship. This might be true; it is hard to deal with the reality that there’s no more time, that it’s no longer possible to fix things, to figure it out.

Running had connected us, managed to keep us connected over the years, through substance abuse, infidelity, divorce, political differences. I drifted away, but it was our conversations about running that allowed us to maintain a semblance of a bond. This connection formed early when I would provide support to him during long-distance races and then during high school, when even though I was a skate-rat, I ran track & cross-country, and he would coach me.

Running is a creative space; I work out plans for projects and will often record voice memos of ideas, notes that I want to eventually write down. Much of what’s below was logged to the beat of gravel under foot.

The day before the funeral, I was working on his eulogy while running, I clocked a 7 minute 31 second mile. Connected in time.

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Images are always seen within a given context. When we look at photographs in a book, they are understood in relation to where they’re seen, to the image before and the image after. Photographs are set in context by sequence and sequence is a function of time.

Time also affects context. Looking back at the photographs I made the day before my father died, I became more acutely aware of the mutability and instability of context. A curious thing happens when a photograph is changed due to an external incident, or occurrence -- the image is viewed as representative of the before and altered by the after, and in this duality becomes a marker of that before/after schism, a decisive moment of another sort.

Photographs change, their weight changes, they become activated -- by other images and by externalities. A year later, the images I made in Vermont not knowing it was the day before my father would die, hundreds of miles away, are seen differently, as are the photographs made over the few days leading up to his funeral. And I see how photographs from dozens of years, seemingly static, can change as well.

I look back at family photos from decades ago and think of the potential they held the moment they were made, all the potential futures they contained, and how they represented one past the day before he died and another past now that he is gone. Photographs of him as a young man, of me as a child in his arms, have been altered in a way, re-fixed, representing a past made newly permanent. With this they have become sweeter and more perfect, and at the same time, for the possibilities rendered null by his death, bitter and more painful.

Each pictured past is perfect and imperfect, and both cut painfully; a past-perfect -- we had something once; and imperfect -- it is no longer.

I think about how photographs contain what didn’t happen, as well as what did; what we hope will happen, and in their unique way, what’s going to happen; I think about how they contain what we think we understand, and if we’re lucky, how they also contain what we don’t.

Looking back, we can see that it was all there; that it still is all there.