Reliquary
While some photos survive in attics or museums, the vast bulk of the billions of images around us are fragile, fade, and become meaningless garbage. Time settles its accounts, and I am always reminded of this when I see photographs disintegrating into nothingness.
Photographing an abandoned house one winter, I found several pornographic magazines in a room littered with deer parts, moldy clothing, and a pair of artificial breasts. The magazines had been exposed to the elements, chewed by rats or insects, and the images betrayed by the paper’s vulnerability to age and decay. Two years later, while taking pictures in a landfill, I found another cache of pornography – this time burned and partially buried. I kept some of the material to photograph under controlled lighting.
Images of women’s bodies are used to sell just about every commodity imaginable, from sports cars to soft drinks to herbal supplements. Pornography simply makes the image itself the commodity. In this context, bodies are separated from their identities and become objects that can be purchased, viewed, and ultimately thrown away when their newness has worn off. The fact that these particular magazines had been discarded, even intentionally damaged, made this commodification (and with it, a subtext of cruelty and violence) vividly and distressingly apparent. Less apparent is the fact that pornography cannot exist without a market. Thus, it depends upon and sustains a system in which bodies and desire (and desire's twin, loneliness) are both reduced to means for profit.
Alongside a basic unease at their content, I found that the decaying images also instilled a poignant sense of mortality. While these magazines preserve, and exploit, the youth and beauty of the models that appear in them, they too must decay – even our illusions are mortal. The gradual disintegration of the magazine images suggested to me the ultimate disintegration of the bodies they depicted. This disintegration is, of course, inevitable and something to which all of us are subject. That the images showing this irreversible movement into extinction are erotic, and thus connected with the primary life-giving act (sex), point to the cycle of conception and death.
Artist Statement
I seldom know what I am doing as I do it.
There’s a line from a William S. Burroughs piece I like. I mention it when people ask what I’m working on. It goes something like:
“I am a secret agent and I don’t know who I am working for. I take my instructions from street signs, advertisements and snippets of conversation I pull out of the air like a hungry vulture tearing meat…”
I know that, in the end, it will be a body of photographs. But how many photos, how they will fit together, the story or feeling they will carry…. I never know these things as I’m working. I just photograph whatever interests me. Some of it will be useful later, most won’t. I think of it as being a little like riding a train facing backwards; things only become clear when they’re far away.
This is a work in progress. Right now, I imagine the finished piece tying together photos shot over the last ten years into a loose narrative about wandering. About going into the desert not really sure what I’m looking for, but believing that is there. And that somehow, once I’ve found whatever it is, I will be different. Whole.
But since I don’t know what or where it is, I just keep looking.
Frank Miller
2008