We follow the spurts of grass that jump from the newly freed ground. Sand and dust replace earth. The soft leaves of tiny shrubs reach up to a wooden plank, climbing its side and finding slim palms from a dark cavern. Shrouded in leaves and vines, these palms stare hopelessly toward the sky. Three vagabonds shouting past a dumpster and the eroding ruin of a wall, urge the sky to free them, to turn them loose to the sun.
Then slowly the walls build up, boarded and locked. No one. They stand so weakly, their arms held up by only the air beneath them. Any movement, any threat, and they will surely crumble. Paint reaches backward to the ground, searching for help, a release from its dying host. Its skin sits burned and blackened atop the failing walls. The heat warped glass, metal and wood, bending the place, curving its hard edges, softening it. It blurs itself with the world, losing the sharp definition of a building. A ruin stands now, affixed to the universe, locked to its heaven and its earth. Little eyes creep over its edge, searching for the place that once was. But it lies no longer. It lives with the world, now.
click on it, it gets bigger
This place holds a very strange place in my life. It was a haven. Kids would go there to get high or trip on this or that, or just go wild. An abandoned shack we made our own. In its past life, it was a factory or warehouse of sorts. Conveyor belts and miniature cranes dotted the inside. Some men spent years there, moving this and that, here and there. Their sweat lived in the concrete, plaster and drywall. As did ours. We were kings there. We could crash through a thin, weak wall with a battle cry, kicking and jumping, then laugh like madmen, howling out into the abandoned; like happy monsters finding home.
I saw this place on fire. Smoke from it filled the area and covered my school in a soft haze. That day was a dream, as if the whole world had fallen into some uncertain freedom, detached from rules; floating on.
this isn't it, but it's what it felt like
It is a photograph of a building. An old decrepit place, but still a building. Though it bends and shapes itself, it is what it is. The studium. The "what is there."
Alone, this photograph means much more to me than it likely does to anyone else. It requires the context. Without that, it sits just a building, just some place that is somewhere doing something. But its power derives itself from the memory, the place in time it holds. The image bends the building, the way it bent our world. It lives in different rules, curved and uneven. This is the punctum, the little jab of meaning that jumps forth from the image. Alone, without context, this place is just a building, torn apart by the harshness of time. But as we gaze into the photograph’s soft grain with the knowledge of its history, it holds a little piece of humanity, a little breath of air, softly exhaled.
