That Yellow garage- P and I drove past it two or three times a week on our way to and from visiting her mom. Every time we drove by it looked a little different. Sunny days cast heavy shadows, cloudy days just made it look sad. The garage was all that was left of a house long since gone, unremarkable, a little forlorn, asleep. At first I never gave it any mind, but it quickly became a landmark, a milestone along the route. I recalled the admonition I frequently gave my photography students- “If something catches your eye, don’t tell yourself that you’ll come back and photograph it the next time by.” “One- you won’t, and two- it won’t be the same thing next time.” “All you’ll have is that blurry memory.”
So this time I stopped and took a few quick pics with my phone. The next time by we stopped again- I brought my camera to make it all the more official- and I was correct in my admonition. The vine that had been growing up one side was missing- cut back or fallen, but not the same. And I began to think about that blurry memory- the details I missed at fifty mph, its very size and shape, and placement along the road. Every time by it was changed. So we visited the garage on a few more occasions and noted the evolution of it’s decay. I called an end to the experiment when a large ash tree nearby fell and blocked the view.
I had no idea what to do with the photos. I couldn’t see a “there” there. But I needed to do something- so I tried an experiment. I took five or six images and opened them all in Photoshop. They were taken from different angles and distances, and like the garage were all different in some way. I began to stack them in layers, and blended them with differing opacities, as though I was building a single compound memory from a bunch of smaller ones. Wow. It was glorious. And it made sense to me as what I was attempting to illustrate, that memory is compounded over time and never the same twice. I made a few more images over the next few weeks, focusing on familiar places and icons of my daily existence. And I said to myself- “self- there might actually be a ‘there’ here.”
I shopped around a few pieces that I had framed, and two of them found a temporary home in the Erie Art Museum Spring Show, and one sold through a local gallery. Cool, right? “Yay” external validation! So of course I stopped making them.
But not for the reason you might think…