Photographs have a duality; tethering us to earth while permitting us to travel to another reality, a way to be simultaneously present and absent (Archer 22).  A photograph holds both a quasi-presence and a symbol of absence (Sontag 20).  My pictures denoted communicating in the language of inquiry, of questioning why, of turning ordinary things into extended parts of my emotional self. Photography was the way I perceived life.

 

Finding images was reasonably easy for me because I had trained myself—or the world had trained me—to see differently.  Inanimate objects spoke to me; I would notice discarded things, the cast-offs, the isolated, the lonely, and the sad. 

 

Chairs spoke to me the most. As did tossed umbrellas; absences in public places, the crumbling of a façade, doors that had dispositions, windows with billowing curtains.  Flocks of birds would fly around my head, shadows emerged on sidewalks, puddles filled with muted leaves, empty shoes, wires against a blue dusk sky and the backs of people, always the backs of people as they walked away from me.

 

There is an inherent intimate connection to memory; be it family, friends, moments, events, something you reach for but cannot grasp.  There is an invisible time/space bridge that bonds subject to the viewer.

 

 

Empty chairs are poignant.

 

A chair serves as a respite for a person. We use chairs to get off our feet, to listen to each other, to share a meal, to learn something.  When I see an empty chair, I automatically sense a presence of an absence.  I hear a narrative; I hear the story of the chair.  Melancholy surrounds the chair.  

 

On walks my eyes always gravitate to empty chairs waiting at curbside for a trash pick-up.  These chairs would be in various stages of demise, some missing legs, or the seat needed to be reupholstered, sometimes the wood would be worn away or the metal rusted, way past their use by date. 

 

The sight of an empty chair is a memento mori.