1: The Stratification of Longing 2018 - 2019

My numerical age had never been a significant factor in my frame of mind until a month before my seventieth birthday when I realized my history had become longer than my future.  With some reluctance, I began constructing an inventory and editing plan for my possessions.  My accumulation of books, having been intellectually and emotionally crucial for decades, presented difficult decisions. Many represented milestones in personal growth and knowledge that I've ritually packed and unpacked each time I moved. Now their continued value for my yet to be determined number of future years had become less certain.

While moving my books around the studio to be photographed I became acutely aware of their weight and fragility. I began viewing them as artifacts composed of bound paper and was drawn to the textures, colors and patterns of their delicate pages full of information. Some volumes exhibited friction marks, evidence of frequent touch or traces of an occasional accident. Others appeared pristine or lightly used and some were constructed of poor quality materials that had gradually darkened and disintegrated through time.  Stacking the books created rhythms of covers and pages that reminded me of the tall shale cliffs I've known since childhood in the nearby Rocky River Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks. Those complex sedimentary formations, a record of ancient Devonian era seabeds, were the first evidence that ignited my youthful awe and appreciation of the vast extent of geological time.

Since the 1990's I have photographed autobiographical artifacts as a method for understanding my own history and its relationship to external structures and societal expectations. Within these past projects I've frequently constructed a larger image by combining a series of several photographs.  In this project I photographed sections of the stacked books then digitally combined these modules to create long high resolution composite photographs with a visual rhythm of textured book pages and covers.  When presented vertically the images parallel the stratum of the Metropark cliff's record of geological time with the individual pages and covers of my books functioning like sedimentary layers of information transformed into a photographic record of a lifetime of longing to know.  Shown in a horizontal format the pages and covers also resemble the presentation of DNA data. These long photographs can also become component modules assembled into larger vertical or horizontal wall constructions.