Fishing for Tales
By Gary Joseph Cohen
30 Sep 2009
I have to admit, my memory is not what it used to be.
Nearly forty years old, the gardens and great lawns of my brain are undergoing a glacial but steady process of hedging and trimming. Tall dendritic trees, once mighty and expansive, are truncating. Limbs that used to stretch across and connect one hemisphere of experience to the other are making their way to the great wood chipper of the cerebellum. Tell me something today, like, "Don't forget to bring the...," and low and behold, I will forget to bring the...what was I just saying?
Were it not for photographs, I dare say that much of the stories we attach to memory would sift and leach into the lower clays of the imagination, where after several decades, would eventually flatten and fossilize into cryptically abstract specimens of their once warm-blooded selves. Admittedly, there are stories that go undocumented, and through elaboration and hyperbolic distortion, expand in mythical proportions. Whether of the bar room variety, or biblical in nature, these stories on micro and macro levels scaffold our sense of order and awe. But then there are the incidental anecdotes that hide in the corners of our eyes and lips. They don't take up much space, but like the dark matter that permeates the known universe, constitute a majority of existence. It's in there that pictures help to restore, and in some cases, monumentalize the incidental. Incidentally, "incident" shares a root with "cadence," alluding to the process of falling, or falling away. Even as I write this sentence, the one I intended to write, the one you'll never see, dissolved before my fingertips, disappearing into that great compost heap festering just behind the cloudy window of the eyes.
In the process of traveling across North America and more recently Asia, there aren't many grand stories to transmit. I ate and slept, and rubbed my bald head on cold mornings, and got lost here and there, but never had to cut off a limb with a pocket knife to escape a slot canyon, or drink my own urine to cross the desert. Instead, I met a boy whose feet were swollen from marching in a German heritage parade. His cheeks were flush from too much sun and time away from his computer monitor. I met a boy roughly his same age selling fossils, maybe no more than twenty miles away from Mt. Everest, for the survival of his family. He, too, looked like he could have used a chair from standing all day. I met a man waiting out the rain to deliver a floral arrangement. There was a woman grabbing a smoke; she wore duck-egg-blue contacts and smiled like the Mona Lisa. And there was a woman in her late seventies, I'm guessing, who came to greet this pale stranger of the West, inviting him into her home: a tent made of yak hair; an oven made of caramel-hued clay. Smoke rose in the way all smoke does when there's no rush to evacuate a warm hearth.
Lest this rumination dip too deeply into the honey-filled jar of nostalgia, it's important to remember that not all rememberances yield sweetness. There is bitterness behind nearly every story, even if it is there only to heighten by contrast the dolce in the vita. In the case of Robert Frank's "The Americans," who can forget the image of the black woman holding a porcelain-white baby: tender on the eyes; deeply riddled with privilege and social-inequality through and through. What was the story before the image, before our surrogate witness intervened for a 1/125th of a second?
I remember less and less these days. But what I do remember I pass along to you in the space of a few images stuck to my corners. The stories behind the images, like tail lights on a long highway. The stories before the pictures, you illuminated and squinting into what matters most.
5 responses
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Gary Joseph Cohen added a link (30 Sep 2009):
For more information on Gary Joseph Cohen's work, please visit: (www.garyjosephcohen.com)
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Simon Kossoff said (2 Oct 2009):
My vote! Fantastic story and really wonderful images!
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Alexis Gerard gave props (26 Oct 2009):
This essay, like anything else by GJC, absolutely deserves to be published
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Gary Joseph Cohen said (29 Oct 2009):
Thank you, brother Alexis.
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Antonija Rimanić said (8 Dec 2009):
I really enjoyed reading, and photos are great, but i think you already knew that =) good luck!
