Still
“STILL” (the title referring both to continuity through time and to the immobility of a photograph) is a series of 20 triptychs, shot during the four years I lived in Japan. Beginning with innocent, even idyllic, images centering on childhood, the triptychs move to themes of separation, alienation and violence. A simple though obscure narrative ties the piece together, as a protagonist moves through a haunted world attempting to find a way back to a home that time has erased.
I am fascinated—maybe driven—by our urge to preserve the present as it evaporates in front of us. We need the past to locate ourselves, to help us understand where we are and how we got here. But our memories are unreliable. Nostalgia, fantasy and recollection spill into each other, and forgetting wipes it all away. And while photography seems to preserve memories, it really just creates surrogates, ultimately replacing what they were intended to protect. A photograph might be a window through time, but it’s always a dirty window that distorts and obscures more than it transmits.
(A copy of the handmade book made from this project was purchased for the permanent collection at the George Eastman house in 2005.)
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