Notes on the landscape - writings for "heaven is below the earth"
excerpts from my thesis paper on memories, thoughts on nature and photography.
The roads look familiar. I remember it oddly. I remember tripping on the sidewalk and scraping up my knee the time my babysitter told me about the time her foot got run over by a car. I asked about her scar. I remember the time my dad had flooded the kitty pool because he left the hose on overnight. I woke up in the middle of the night that day and was so confused I thought it was a dream. The pool towering over me on the deck. It still feels like one although we’ve talked about that many times.
I set my face to the hillside. The grass is soft, bright green. It’s always summer here. I am sucked in. The sun, white and hot, warming my skin, creating shapes under my eyelids. The breeze grazed over me. Breathing in the smell of the damp grass. It smells of the summers of racing my bike down the street. Falling off my scooter and chipping my tooth. Climbing the backyard fence to my neighbors house. Climbing the ladder left behind and wishing for a treehouse I could see from my bedroom window. The treehouse was our imaginary escape.
It reminds me of the smell of the ocean breeze. The sand that would warm up my bones. Burying myself underground because the breeze would make me chilly after I was in the ocean. Running by the shoreline, racing to the pier. The salt water sting in my eyes and the smell of the it in my hair. It was long then
It reminds me of the fallen trees just behind the house. The power lines span endlessly along the trail. The wonder of my eyes as I stood next to something greater than me. The smell of rain and concrete and wet leaves. Feeling my body sink into the tall grass, letting myself fall and dance between the weeds. Hoping that I would magically sink and be brought back.
The children running. I can’t hear their voices. The bright green grass, the water from the hose. The swings they were hanging off of. The same old house. The story of running into the cornfield. I can picture them running until their lungs hurt, so fast and back to the house. I want to run until my legs can no longer take me further or until they take me back.
Making photographs is my own selfish act. To escape everything around me , to leave it and create anew. Making images, collecting images, hoarding images has always been about making my memory permanent. I am creating my own world and showing it to everyone else. But this world is not just for me, it can be for others. I create because I am trying to understand what I do not know. To make sense of it. I do not know why things have to only be temporary so I attempt to make them permanent.
Larry Sultan wrote in Pictures From Home that in the project is to take photography literally:
“To stop time. I want my parents to live forever”
Sometimes I think I would want to live forever.
I dream of a made-up place, a secret place where I can reside. This place is pure imagination, a combination of things I dream of. It could be a house on the cliffside. A place surrounded by trees. It’s a place to think, to be,. It's quiet and there’s no one around. Others are welcome however, as long they do not disturb it. It’s safe. There are hidden mysteries here. Moss, roots and vines growing over the past steps, what used to be here. What was left behind.
I find this place by wandering. A path leads through, it's long and windy but it's there at the end. I find this place in my dreams, awakening with my body on the damp grass, almost like a blanket over me. I try to find this place amongst reality, an attempt to further its existence, by believing in it so hard, trying to see it and find it amongst everything.
I see it in the way small plants grow out of the sidewalk. I see it in the way branches form to the fences. I see it in the opening in the tall grass. I see it beyond the powerlines. I can hear it in the way the trees rustle in the wind. Watching as their bristles move in unison. I can feel it in the way that my body forms to the coldness of the boulder, in the way I hope the moss will grow over my body in the same way it does there. I can feel it in the way that the grass forms to my body when I lie down, hoping to dream myself away
Once I arrive, nothing will exist beyond it. This place will stay forever. Hopefully I will find it in my next life and every life beyond. It never changes, always stuck in a place of in-between. A purgatory of its own. The grass does not grow any further, the vines do not cover more. It is frozen at this moment. In the act of photographing, the subject, the object, the self is recorded and kept in time. It will always be preserved.