Souvenirs
You go to a place.
You do whatever you came there to do, have whatever experience you have. Then you leave. And the place remains. There, as it was before, only without you in it. The place silently remains while endless streams of people move through it like ghosts.
We are ephemeral, but places endure.
For most of the 20th Century, Niagara Falls was the place for the honeymooning couple, a thriving monument to sexuality through marriage. Today, however, it seams rather desolate, a relic from a naïve age. The hopeful, outward-directed longing that is at the heart of tourism (and of love) has inverted into a mournful rumination of the past. There is an eerie stillness that hangs over any tourist spot during the off-season, but here it seems more permanent.
Like love, tourism expresses our longing for something that will take us out of our ordinary selves and make us better, more complete.
Knowing that our memories will disappear, we look for physical artifacts to fix and preserve them. Whether we buy them in shops or create them with cameras and video recorders, these souvenirs are the physical cages we hope will keep our tiny, precious memories from escaping.
They become the signposts that remind us where we have been, what we have seen.
And what we have lost.
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