This is what I've been shooting over the past couple of months along the banks of the Willamette River. It isn't done yet.
A little over a year ago, my wife and I went to Cambodia on our honeymoon. In Phnom Penh we visited several sites connected to the horrifying reign of the Khmer Rouge. Outside of the city we saw the area where the bulk of the executions were done, and for which the film "The Killing Fields" is named.
It was a serene meadow, white flowers were blossoming and the day was clear and bright. A gentle breeze added to the almost hypnotic tranquility. On the paths, however, where the grass had been worn away, bits of tattered cloth poked out of the ground. They were fragments of the clothing the people were wearing when they died there 30 years ago. Once we noticed it, we realized that it was everywhere, and that we were walking over the remains of people that had been forced to dig their own graves before being murdered.
Since then, I have been fascinated by the things I find on the riverbanks near where I live. These objects, at once intimate and mundane, separated from the people that gave them meaning, seem to me like archeological fragments. Their tiny presence acts as indicator of much greater absences.
April 2008
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